WHAT IS NEW?
Dec 3 2017 [Etheldreme]
Highlights:
* Many new map-editor features, including mouse support.
* Enemy "appear" animations.
* Customizable hero experience curve.
* Textbox save/load/delete/end game conditionals.
* Unhid still-experimental option for non-320x200 games.
* Copy-paste text between the editor and other applications.
* Visual browsers for sprites and many other things.
* See below for more...
* New Features
* You can now browse for sprites, items, and many other properties
rather than typing in their ID numbers. [James]
* In the text box condition editor, you can browse for shops [James]
* Menu bit "Remember selection when reopening" [Ralph]
* Removed 100% upper limits on attack chain stat % conditions, and
removed most hero/enemy stat limits
* Rectangle slices can now optionally use any box border set.
They are no longer limited to just the box borders defined in
box styles [James]
* Battle victory screens can optionally auto-advance after a given
amount of time [James]
* Slice editor/debugger improvements:
* Organised the menu, irrelevant settings hidden
* Indicate NPC and hero slices, and protected status
* Press R to reset a slice's position to 0,0 and alignment/anchoring
to top-left corner
* Press F7 to hide the 'ants' outline around the selected slice
[Ralph]
* Ctrl+C/V to copy-and-paste text now uses the Mac/Windows/X11
clipboard, so you can copy-paste from/to other applications [Ralph]
* Customizable Experience Curve for each hero [MirceaKitsune]
* You can choose tags that will be turned on when heroes are at
specific levels [James]
* Support for games created in 1997 (OK, just the one game) [Ralph]
* Enemies can use optional "Appear" animations, which are reversed
versions of the death fades. [James]
* New textbox conditionals to save, load, or end the game, delete a
save, or show the load/save menus [MirceaKitsune]
* The option to use resolutions other than 320x200 (in the
Window-size Options menu). This has been in testing for a long
time, but still isn't complete -- for example backdrops and battles
are still 320x200. Nothing has changed in this release except that
the option isn't hidden any more [Ralph]
* Three new ways to visualise map layers in the map editor:
* Press Ctrl+Shift+arrows or Ctrl+right-click-drag to "skew" map
layers (offset from each other)
* Press T to tint each map layer a different color
* Press T twice to grey out layers other than the selected one
[Ralph]
* Mouse support in the map editor! Not complete, but has the
basics. You can't click on any of the overlays or bits of text (eg
the list of zones) but you can click on toolbars and NPCs, doors,
etc. Includes a new Stamp tool in wallmap mode. [Ralph]
* Option to export a full resolution image of a map, optionally with
NPCs [Ralph]
* Map editor settings menu, accessed with F8. Most of the settings
are new, including showing a grid [Ralph]
* ID3 metadata info is preserved when imported MP3 files are converted
to OGG [Ralph]
* You can now (incrementally) search F1 help pages, just type! [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Features
* "get rect raw border" and "set rect raw border" [James]
* "clone slice" [Ralph]
* "expand string" now has an optional argument that allows it to
expand ${} codes based on the data in a save slot instead of the
currently running game state [James]
* "reset formation" and "reset formation slot" command to undo
scripted modifications to battle formations. [James]
* "set slice size" and "slice is map layer" [Ralph]
* "NPCstat:tag1", "NPCstat:tag2" and "NPCstat:onetime use flag"
constants for "read NPC"/"alter NPC" [Ralph]
* "string sprintf" takes %b and %o codes for binary and octal [Ralph]
* "check wall collision x/y" and "move slice with wallchecking" now
allow sliding along walls instead of stopping on touching them:
added a 'friction%' argument to each [Ralph]
* Script reloading while live previewing now defaults to on; it no
longer tries to reload unmodified scripts [Ralph]
* "npc reference from slice", "hero rank from slice" [Ralph]
* "slice type" [Ralph]
* "first slice of type", "next sibling of type", and missing commands
like "first text slice", "next text sibling", etc. [Ralph]
* "assert(x==y)" now adds x and y values to the assert message [Ralph]
* Global default Map autorun, On-keypress, Instead-of-battle, After-
battle and Each-step script triggers [Ralph]
* Changes
* "greyscale palette" command now looks better; just averaging red,
green and blue is perceptually very wrong [Ralph]
* Bugfixes
* Copy-paste in slice editor didn't copy slice extra data or autosort
(also, couldn't edit the autosort sort order) [Ralph]
* Windows only: Fixed a whole bunch of console windows popping up when
entering Distribute Game menu, and elsewhere [Ralph]
* "fill parent" and "set slice width/height" didn't work on Panel
or Special slices [Ralph]
* ${} codes in map names display correctly in the save/load screen
[James]
* A nonsensical item ownership number was showing up when hiring
heroes at a shop [James]
* Heroes killed by HP-cost in battle now correctly show their
death frame instead of vanishing [James]
* "add enemy to formation" was not putting enemies at the correct
Y coordinate [James]
* Fixed "check wall collision x/y" and "move slice with wallchecking"
often failing to detect collision with corners of walls. Also,
"move slice with wallchecking" now returns special values when it hit
a corner rather than returing that it hit walls on two sides [Ralph]
* Fix lots of g_debug.txt errors and long lags when using the Ctrl-F1
teleport tool [Ralph]
* Ancient .rpg files couldn't be played if they were renamed [Ralph]
* Couldn't delete BAM files [Ralph]
* Changing the zoom in Custom no longer changes window size [Ralph]
* The height of awrapped text slice didn't update when its width
changed (except in the slice editor) [Ralph]
* The scroll bar of a scroll slice inside a clipping slice was drawn
at the wrong position [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* --nowait option when importing scripts from the commandline [Ralph]
September 22 2017 [Dwimmercrafty+1]
* Bugfixes
* Fixed a critical bug that erased On-Death-Bequest attacks and
Non-Elemental-Counterattacks from all enemies when a game was
loaded into custom. If you lost enemy data, and you still have
a backup copy of your game from before August 29 2017, please
ask the developers for help on the Forums. If you do not have
a backup from before that date, you will have to re-add the
missing On-Death-Bequest and Non-Elemental-Counter attacks
to each enemy's attack list.
We are very sorry about the bug!
August 31 2017 [Dwimmercrafty]
Highlights:
* NPC pathfinding, and other new NPC movetypes including follow-walls
* Record .gif videos with Ctrl-F12
* More map layers, hero definitions, and global variables
* More info shown in-game in shops and spell lists
* One-way walls
* Lots of new in-game debug keys/F8 debug menu options, and a similar
new menu in Custom accessed with F9
* Can jump to attack, enemy, textbox and npc editors from other editors
* Lots of progress on mouse support
* On Windows, Custom's window is now resizable; resizing works almost
everywhere
* Sound effect volume control
* New Features
* Mark Non-elemental Elementals menu lets you define which elements
shouldn't count as elemental for enemy spawning purposes [James]
* Dramatic Pause for attack animations. Unlike "Delay Ticks" this
always pauses time for everybody in battle. Dramatic pause starts
after the (undelayed) caption appears, but before the visible
animation begins [James]
* New attacker animation "Standing Strike" [James]
* Enemies can now do a non-elemental counterattack for any attack
that lacks elemental damage. Similar to non-elemental spawning
[James]
* Spells in spell lists can now also display HP, Money, and Item
costs. MP costs are no longer invisible in Level-MP spell lists
[James]
* If your max level is lower than 99, the hero stat editor now
shows a middle column that displays stats at max level [James]
* Per-textbox each-line sound effects, overriding the global option
[MirceaKitsune]
* 'Silence' as an option for textbox Music setting [MirceaKitsune]
* Removed NPC definitions limit (NPC instance limit remains) [Ralph]
* Added Redo (Ctrl+Y) to the sprite editor, and made the undo
history size a few hundred times larger [Ralph]
* Hold Shift in sprite and maptile editor to move faster, and use
the number keys to change selected colour in sprite editor [Ralph]
* Delete key in doorlinks menu deletes a doorlink [Ralph]
* The hero battle menu editor now lets you change the text (caption)
and color of an option, set tag conditions to disable it, and
specify whether to hide it if disabled [Ralph]
* Press Ctrl+F11 anywhere (in Game/Custom) to access a menu to
record and replay macros (recorded keyboard input). You can use
this to record game playthroughs, but it is still quite brittle
for that purpose (many commands can cause desyncs) [James, Ralph]
* Press Ctrl+F12 anywhere to start/stop recording a .gif video,
saved next to the F12 screenshots. (You can use a .gif compressor
program to considerably shrink the files.) [Ralph]
* Map names can use the same ${} codes as textboxes, for example
you could name a map "${H0}'s House". [James]
* "Ignore Passmap" NPC setting, to walk through walls but not zones,
the map edge, or NPCs/heroes. (Unlike "set npc ignores walls",
which causes zones and map edge to be ignored.) [Ralph]
* Added "Music Volume" and "Sound Volume" menu options. These
replace the "Volume" option in the default main menu (which is
the same as "Music Volume" except pressing Enter on it now opens
another menu with Music and Sound Volume options). [Ralph]
* Add "Initial music/sound effects volume" settings to the General
Preference Menu. Relatedly, you can now also change the volume
for Custom itself, see next... [Ralph]
* A Global Editor Options menu accessible by pressing F9 anywhere
in Custom, including options "Reimport Scripts", "Test Game",
"Volume", "Zoom" and more [Ralph]
* One-way walls. You can turn the walls on a tile into one-way walls
by pressing W in the passmap editor. All the walls on a tile are
either normal or one-way; you can't mix them on the same tile.
Not supported with default passability yet. [Ralph]
* Press +/- in wallmap mode to change the way walls are drawn [Ralph]
* Press H in the slice collection editor to toggle whether the
children of a slice are shown in the menu (does not affect slice
visibility) [James]
* New NPC movement types:
* "Chase You (Pathfinding)" finds the shortest path to the hero,
moving around obstacles, or else gets as close as possible [James]
* "Chase You (Direct)" and "Avoid You (Direct)" which don't randomize
and do nothing when stuck behind an obstacle. The old Chase/Avoid
movement types are now captioned "(Meandering)" [James]
* "Follow Walls (Right)" and "Follow Walls (Left)" as well as "Stops
for others" variants of both. [James]
* New or improved in-game debug keys (all available in F8 menu):
* F1 text box debug info (only when a text box is displayed) [Ralph]
* F4 tag debug mode sane controls and display improvements [Ralph]
* Press F6 twice to display NPC debug info with additional NPC
collision information [James]
* Also, in F6 NPC debug mode you can view NPC info by mousing-over
an NPC [Ralph]
* Re-added F7 debug key to pan the camera (we used to have a similar
debug key a while ago) [Ralph]
* Added PAUSE debug key which works while walking around [Ralph]
* Options to make the window resizable, or change the zoom [Ralph]
* Ctrl-F8 (both Game and Custom) to switch graphics backends [Ralph]
* General bitset "Don't stop music when starting/loading game" [Ralph]
* Ability to reorder shop items/things in the editor [Ralph]
* Preview of the surrounding tiles, or tiling of the current tile
while drawing a maptile (click on the preview to toggle or hit P)
[Matthias Meike]
* You can now also remap the background color from the Import/Export
Backdrop/Tileset menu; also added 'View with background' [Ralph]
* Numbers can be typed with Numpad keys (I never even tried!) [Ralph]
* Text editing: Ctrl-Backspace/Delete to delete the previous/next word
(and for Mac, Option(aka Alt)-Delete/ForwardDelete, and move by word
with Option-Left/Right). The old Ctrl-Backspace key to delete all
records after the current has changed to Shift-Backspace. You can
also press Delete on the line instead. [Ralph]
* Raised the limit on hero definitions from 60 to 512 [Ralph]
* Raised map layer limit from 8 to 16 [Ralph]
* Added "Export scripts backup copy" option to Script Management menu
(HSpeak has saved a backup copy of scripts for years now) [Ralph]
* New preference bitset "Keep caterpillar length the same when speed
changes" [James]
* "Export to File" option in Script Usage and Find Broken Script
Triggers menus [Ralph]
* Added general preference bitset "Heroes use Walk in Place animation
while idle" [James]
* You can jump to the attack, enemy and textbox editors from anywhere
you select an attack/enemy/box, or add a new one directly [Ralph]
* In NPC placement mode you can open the NPC editor by pressing ENTER
on tiles with NPCs (edit them) or without (edit current NPC) [Ralph]
* Shops now display how many of an item you already own as well as
how many you have equipped [James]
* Metadata is shown for .ogg files in the music and sfx menus [Ralph]
* Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V in the NPC definition editor copy/pastes NPCs [Ralph]
* Most of Custom (except the map editor) now has at least partial
mouse support. Also, experimental in-game mouse support (can be
activated in the F8 debug menu) [James, Ralph]
* (For now) made gfx_sdl the default backend for Custom on Windows, so
that you can resize the window! Try it in the map or slice editors!
Almost all editors can now run at higher resolutions [Ralph, James]
* Image previewing when browsing for an image to import (only when
the window is larger than 320x200) [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Features
* "menu item at pixel" [Ralph, James]
* You can now profile scripts (collect statistics on running times)
by pressing Ctrl+F9. (Before, you had to download a special build
to profile scripts.) More useful stats are now collected. [Ralph]
* "run game" quits the current game and loads a different game
(.rpg file/.rpgdir), and "check game exists" [Ralph]
* You can now pass arguments to the newgame and loadgame scripts by
giving extra arguments to "resetgame" and "loadfromslot" [Ralph]
* "reparent to npc" and "reparent to hero" convenience functions
[James]
* Added "show new game" argument to "load menu" command [Ralph]
* "get battle countdown" and "set battle countdown" [Ralph]
* "check wall collision x", "check wall collision y",
"move slice with wallchecking" [Ralph]
* "slice parent" alias to "parent slice"
* "get npc speed"
* Added "textbox text" to read all lines from a textbox into a
string variable at once [Matthias]
* "load sprite" and "replace sprite" (general versions of "load
hero sprite", etc) [Ralph]
* Commands to check whether or not each of the suspend states is
active, for example: "player is suspended", "npc walls are
suspended", etc... [James]
* NPC pathfinding commands: "pathfind npc to" "npc chases npc"
"cancel npc walk" [James]
* "get screen width" and "get screen height" [James]
* "mouse release" to check if a click has just ended [James]
* Commands for reading door information can now optionally read
information about doors on other maps instead of the current map
[James]
* Changes to the language:
* -= and += now return their result, like := does, so they can be
used as expressions [Ralph]
* subscript variables and arguments can now have the same name as
variables in the parent script, "shadowing" them [Ralph]
* Hexidecimal, octal and binary number constants, written like
0xCABBA9E, 0o377 and 0b1101111000011 [Ralph]
* Added "allow switching" argument to "equip menu" command [Ralph]
* "gain hero stat", to easily increase/decrease a stat [Ralph]
* "slice at pixel" and "find colliding slice" now respect clipping
* Increased highest available global variable id number from
16383 -> 50000 [James]
* "set active battle pause for animations" [Ralph]
* Changes
* Sound effects used to play at max volume, which has now changed
to a default of 80% (because music defaulted to just 50%). In
newly created games the defaults are both 75%. [Ralph]
* When importing a BMP, unless the palette is identical, color 0
won't be used unless you explicitly pick it [Ralph]
* Can input ID of unnamed lookup codes in slice editor [Ralph]
* HSpeak now disallows most stray commas [Ralph]
* Scripts triggered from a menu item now always get passed the menu
item extra data, even if the first argument is the menu item
handle [Ralph]
* Custom's splash screen [Ralph]
* Rearranged and renamed Custom's main menu items a bit; Edit Font is
now under Edit Graphics [Ralph]
* Bugfixes
* 64-bit builds of Custom work now... for real this time! They
would crash in several menus. 64 bit Linux builds now available.
[James, Ralph, Matthias]
* In old games, attacks with enemy type-killer bits wrongly counted
as elemental for the purpose of spawning. This fix is only
applied if the game has not been edited since Ypsiliform. [James]
* The party leader will always draw on top of other heroes with the
same Y position, and when heroes and NPCs are on the same layer,
on top of NPCs that have the same Y position (instead of being
layered unpredictably) This is most noticeable with vehicles that
do not hide the leader. [Ralph, James]
* "use item in slot" was not immediately updating item ownership
tags [James]
* Fix broken self-targeting on-death-bequest attacks [James]
* gfx_directx: fixed incorrect positioning of the mouse cursor when
the window was stretched or maximised, which caused problems with
tile cursor movement in the tile browser and tile cutter [Ralph]
* Bug 2006: gfx_directx: major slowdown after switching to another
program while a joystick is plugged in [Ralph]
* If you skipped the title instantly by pressing a key at the wrong
moment then the load menu would have a blacked-out palette [Ralph]
* Harm tiles didn't work if there are 'gaps' in the active party
(caterpillar rank and party slots aren't equal) and caterpillar
party was disabled [Ralph]
* The Battle Formation Set menu miscalculated the number of steps
until a battle occurs (it was too low). Also added average [Ralph]
* music_native/native2: Changing the music volume only worked for
MIDI, while everything else was played at max volume [Ralph]
* Reload sound effects replaced while live-previewing. And
reloading of UI colors & box styles had stopped working. [Ralph]
* "write zone" was meant to return true on success, but didn't [Ralph]
* "running on linux" returned true on Mac and BSD [Ralph]
* Bug 2022: Can't run faster than 60fps under OSX [Ralph]
* Script profiling "time/call" stats were wrong: now #calls only
counts the number of calls while profiling enabled [Ralph]
* gfx_directx: commandline args -f/--fullscreen, --width, --height
and -z/--zoom now work [Ralph]
* Fix a bug in turn-based battles that prevented cancelling backwards
through hero action selection when there was a gap in the party
[James]
* Minimaps now display obsolete Overhead tiles correctly [Ralph]
* If the Background UI color wasn't 0, ellipse slice border/fill color
set to 0 didn't appear transparent [Ralph]
* Textbox line sounds weren't played for the first two lines [Ralph]
* SDL_mixer.dll (Windows only) recompiled to use modplug instead of
mikmod to play modules. This fixes bad sound quality, broken
looping, some files not playing, and too-low volume [Ralph]
* If you used Zenzizenzic (2011) or later to open a game last edited
with Ubersetzung (2007) or earlier, all your enemy "is "
and "weak to/strong to/absorbs" element bits bits were discarded
instead of being upgraded to "takes X% damage from ..." settings.
The upgrade routine has been fixed, but your data is gone. If you
still have an old copy of your game, ask for help. [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* Support latest FreeBASIC version, by adding OPENFILE layer [Ralph]
* Cross-compiling support using "scons target=..." [Ralph]
* After 12 years of cleanup, the source is now free of GOSUBs!
[James, Mike, Ralph, Matthias]
* FreeBSD support [Ralph]
June 06 2016 [Callipygous+1]
* New Features
* If you are using the gfx_sdl backend, almost all menus in
custom can make use of the extra space when the window is
maximized
* Bugfixes
* You weren't meant to be able to resize the window in the sprite
editor; doing so would corrupt graphics (gfx_sdl only) [Ralph]
* Under Unix, utilities couldn't be run (e.g. to encode and import
audio or distribute the game) on files containing the characters
( ) | < > # ; &.
* Running utilities (like hspeak) didn't work on Macs where the
OHRRPGCE hadn't been installed previously [Ralph]
* Delete key didn't work while typing on Macs. And after resizing
the window, text input stopped working. [Ralph]
* Fix the Android virtual gamepad being hidden if you open a game,
exit to the file-picker and then open a game again
* Options for changing the window size now work on Macs [Ralph]
* "unhide mouse cursor" now works in fullscreen too [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* 64 bit builds work now.
April 04 2016 [Callipygous]
* New Features
* Ported to Android phones and tablets, as well as specific support
for the OUYA, Gamestick and FireTV Android-based consoles!
New "Platform-specific options" menu in General Game Data.
See http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Making_Android_games
for information about how to port your game. You can't yet use
the Distribute Game menu for Android. [James, Ralph]
* While placing doors in the map editor you can now specify door
number, and jump to existing door locations [Ralph]
* When buying equipment in a shop, show stat bonuses [James]
* When hiring heroes in a shop, show hero portraits [James]
* Split "Change Box Styles", "Change User-Interface Colors" into
two separate menus [James]
* Split "General Preference Bitsets" and "Backwards-compatibility
Bitsets" into two menus [Ralph]
* Clean up orphaned temporary folders when you exit game [James]
* Games can now optionally increase (or decrease) the number of
save/load slots that are available. [James]
* In the font editor you can set roughly which characters are
icons. If you use a font with the extra Latin-1 characters
(eg. with accents), then those letters will now show correctly in
the .txt file when exporting textboxes. And characters which are
icons won't be exported as garbage in .hsi files. [Ralph]
* Attack chains conditions can now be based on the stats of the
targets [James]
* Attack bitset "Never trigger elemental counterattack" [James]
* The map editor's Clone tool now has separate 'merge' and 'replace'
modes (Ctrl+M to toggle) [Ralph]
* When adding a new map layer you may copy an existing one [Ralph]
* When importing an 8-bit backdrop or tileset (eg. exported from
another game) color 0 (transparency) is preserved; when importing
a 24/32-bit one you now have the option to pick the background
color [Ralph]
* Ability to specify the positions of the frames in the source
spritesheet when importing with the sprite editor in full-set
mode (regular offsets between frames only) [Ralph]
* Additional master palettes in import/ [Soda_piggy, Dragontao]
* Added Saved Game Settings menu, with new options to enable saving
and restoring of:
* the spritelayer slice (default parent for new slices). Slice
handles to these slices remain valid after loading.
* strings (including display settings)
[Ralph]
* Most 32 bit BMPs should be importable now [Ralph]
* Attack damage bitset "Healing poison causes regen, and reverse";
useful when attacker or target absorbs damage [Ralph]
* Press F8 in-game to access the Debug Menu; works in battles too.
It's the only debug key you'll ever need to remember! Includes
new debug options including:
* Test Battles, to fight any formation
* Edit backcompat bitsets
* Email saved game (Android only)
* Toggle debug/reload mode
Also, a few debug keys changed or were removed.
[Ralph, James]
* Added F7 debug key to kill all targettable enemies. Also, the tag
debugger is available in-battle with F4; instant-run moved to
Ctrl+F4. [Ralph, James]
* Added Shift+Tab debug key to speed up the game while held down
(an alternative to Ctrl+Plus/Minus debug keys) [Ralph]
* New formation options: Victory tag to set a tag according to
whether the battle was won, and an option to prevent game over
on death. [MirceaKitsune, Ralph]
* The textbox editor now wraps text as you type [Ralph]
* Automatically keep a few backup copies of any rpg file you edit
This is no substitute for manual backups! Do not forget to
back up your own work! [James]
* Menu for basic importing and exporting of tilemap data from/to
.tilemap and .bmp files (the .bmps are minimaps). [Ralph]
To export images of maps, use RMSephy's tool instead:
https://github.com/Spencer-Zhang/ohr-cartographer
* Option to adjust the framerate. This isn't really a finished
feature, as increasing the framerate leads to crazy walking
animations. You probably shouldn't change the framerate in an
existing game, as it will break all your wait() lengths and hero,
npc, camera, etc. movement speeds. [Ralph]
* Global sound effect options for steal attack success, failure,
and no item to steal. [Ralph]
* Added Regen icon to Battle System Options. [Ralph]
* Hero positions in battle can be customized. [James]
* Enemies can now be placed anywhere onscreen in formations [Ralph]
* Starting hero ID can be customized, and you can also set a
'starting' textbox to display on a new game. [Ralph]
* Added "Old attack positioning at bottom-left of target" back-
compat bitset, which if you turn off places attack sprites at
the center of the target instead. [Ralph]
* You can now run multiple copies of Custom at once (but can't
open the same .rpg more than once). [Ralph]
* You can now use the mouse to select or highlight slices in the
slice editor, press F5 to edit the hidden root slice, F6 to shift
around the view, and V to toggle slice visibility. [Ralph]
* New .rpg files start with a few template walkabout sets, donated
by FnrrfYgmSchnish
* Added options to set how large the game's window should be by
default (by changing the scaling factor). The default size will
for most people be larger than the old 2x default.
Also added a setting to make the game run in fullscreen by
default, unless the player has a remembered preference. [Ralph]
* "Windowed" and "Fullscreen" special menu items. They appear in
the default menu in new games; other games need updating. [Ralph]
* The Distribute Game options will make use of Mac or Windows icons
if it finds the icon files next to your .rpg file. See
http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Icons for details [James]
* Changes
* Hidden menu items no longer affect the width of a menu [Ralph]
* A new Debug/Release mode setting replaces the old script
errorlevel. All existing games default to Release mode. Release
mode hides almost all script errors and warnings; Debug mode
should be used for testing but not for release. [James]
* Bugfixes
* Fixed a few cosmetic bugs in the equip menu including possibly
wrong resultant stat value being shown [Ralph]
* Hero stats menu would freeze if Maximum Level was zero [Ralph]
* You can now change the music with a script immediately after a
map change without the ambient music playing for a moment [Ralph]
* Bug 857: Focus camera cannot focus on spots close to map edge
[James]
* Fix heroes getting stuck in active-time battle mode if they are
in the middle of targetting an attack and get hit with a stun
or mute attack. [James]
* "showtextbox happens immediately" backcompat bitset (on for new
games) helps to prevent bugs due to showing two boxes at once;
"show textbox" now affects "current textbox" immediately [Ralph]
* HSpeak accepts files with Mac line-endings again [Ralph]
* Fix attacks that use the attacker's max stats as the base attack
stat [James]
* Fix vehicles that are configured to disable random battles [James]
* Bug 997: Crash/freeze when fullscreening in Mac OS 10.7 and later
* Bug 777: 'Load' menu called from a customisable menu showed a
'New Game' button which did nothing [Ralph]
* Disabling palette colours for backdrop/tileset import didn't work
for 8-bit BMPs. (Also added mouse support.) [Ralph]
* Bug 1004: Copying a shop didn't copy all the shop items [Ralph]
* Hero attack animations didn't occur if they were weak [Ralph]
* Bug 1005: "hero is walking" didn't work for heroes other than
leader when the caterpillar party was enabled [Ralph]
* Bug 763: NPCs and heros flickered when you walked over the edge
of a wrapping map [Ralph]
* Multi-hit attacks no longer causing dying enemies to dissolve/
fade multiple times, and additional hits are cancelled once all
targets have died [Ralph]
* On-keypress scripts are now always triggered when mouse buttons,
or keys other than move, use and cancel, are held down [Ralph]
* Fix general map data corruption that occured when loading certain
very old games released before July 8 1999 [James]
* Fix a few problems when installed in a read-only location [Ralph]
* Bug 2013: Pre-Beelzebufo games expected backdrops to appear
above the sprite layer [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* "Menu action plotscript" special script trigger to run a script
instead of opening the main menu [Lakan Inocencio]
* subscripts: scripts embeddable inside other scripts, with access
to their local variables [Ralph]
* "read item description" counterpart to existing "read item name"
[James]
* "get sprite default pal" [James]
* "NPC is disabled" for detecting when an NPC reference is disabled
by tags or by one-time-use [James]
* "string sprintf" for easier piecing together of strings [Ralph]
* "script error", "get calling script id", "get script name",
"dump slice tree" [Ralph]
* Make $id="foo" return id so that you can write showstring($1="foo")
* Press F5 in Custom's main menu or Script Management menu to
reimport the last imported scripts. And while testing a game
you can now set the scripts to be reloaded automatically (from the
data reload menu, press F5 in-game to access it) [Ralph]
* "camera follows slice" [Ralph]
* "get/set/reset hero picture/palette" family of commands can now
also manipulate hero portrait pictures [James]
* "get level mp" now takes an additional argument, "current stat"
or "maximum stat" [Ralph]
* plotscr.hsd, scancodes.hsi and your game's .hsi file are now all
included automatically, so there's no need to put those "include"
lines at the top of your scripts file [Ralph]
* "get/set active battle pause on all menus" [James]
* "dissolve sprite", "cancel dissolve", "sprite is dissolving",
"wait for dissolve" [James]
* "running on desktop", "running on mobile", "running on console",
"running on windows", "running on mac", "running on linux"
* "show virtual gamepad", "hide virtual gamepad",
"auto virtual gamepad" [James]
* "get horiz align", "get vert align", "get horiz anchor",
"get vert anchor" [James]
* "create select" "slice is select" "set slice select index"
"get slice select index" "slice child index" [James]
* "create scroll" "slice is scroll" "set scroll bar style"
"get scroll bar style" "set scroll check depth"
"get scroll check depth" "scroll to child" [James]
* "create panel", "slice is panel", "get panel is vertical",
"set panel is vertical", "get panel primary index",
"set panel primary index", "get panel percent as int",
"set panel percent", "get panel pixels", "set panel pixels",
"get panel padding", "set panel padding" [James]
* "next npc reference" [Ralph]
* "input string with virtual keyboard",
"input string with mouse keyboard" [James]
* "unhide mouse cursor", "hide mouse cursor" [James]
* "pixel focus camera" [James]
* Added 'visible only' argument to "slice at pixel" and
"find colliding slice" [Ralph]
* "send email" (Android only), "debug menu" [Ralph]
* Performance Fixes
* Fixed delay when opening a menu that happened when a large number
of menus were defined [Ralph]
* HSpeak was extremely slow (potentially hours) at reading files
with DOS/Windows line-endings on Linux/Mac [Ralph]
* The script interpreter was running tight loops much (eg 2x) slower
than it used to before Beelzebufo [Ralph]
* Creating or reparenting thousands of slices was slow [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* Experimental support for ARM and other non-x86 devices, such as
the Raspberry Pi, and for native 64-bit builds. All thanks to the
FreeBASIC developers! [Ralph]
April 9 2013 [Beelzebufo]
* New Features
* General preference bitset "Don't reset max stats after OOB attack"
to prevent stat maximum values from being altered by attacks and
items outside of battle [Ralph]
* Max tag is now 15999 instead of 999 [James]
* Max NPC onetime tag is now 15999 instead of 1000 [James]
* A bunch of attack bitsets have moved into the Attack Damage
Settings Menu, which now dynamically hides settings and bitsets
that have no effect, and shows in detail how the attack damage
will actually be calculated. [Ralph]
* When adding a new hero, attack, enemy or shop, added the option
to copy an existing one [Ralph]
* Attack can optionally override the hero's weapon sprite [James]
* Enemies can do an On-Death Bequest attack when killed [James]
* Textbox backdrops can optionally allow color 0 to be transparent
[Ralph, James]
* The battle system can now be switched into Turn-based mode [James]
* Attacks can be given a turn-delay in addition to a tick delay
[James]
* Attack base stat is no longer limited to the attacker's current
stat. Now it can also be attacker's max stat, targets current
stat, or target's max stat [James]
* Press Enter or Space on "Base ATK Stat" to browse a menu of all
available base attack stats [James]
* Revamped the hero spell list editor to make it easier to use
[James]
* Menu editor now allows you to adjust the line-spacing [James]
* Menu editor allows the selected item to be highlighted with
the highlight background color in addition to flickering the text
[James]
* Hero battle menus are now customizable. You can remove weapon
attack and the items menu, add specific attacks, add more than 6
menu items, and reorder battle menu items [James]
* Stats can be hidden for a hero. This prevents them from appearing
on the Status and Equip menus. [James]
* Map layers can now be named [Ralph]
* You can set the maximum size of a stack of items in the inventory
with per-item and default settings [Ralph]
* Goodbye 4-bit BMPs! You can now import sprites, backdrops and
tilesets from BMP files saved at (almost) any bitdepth (but
sprites are still limited to 16 colors), and most common versions
of the BMP file format are now supported. Greatly improved the
sprite importer's handling of palettes and previewing. [Ralph]
* Map editor improvements:
* Mark and Clone (copy/paste) tools. They simultaneously copy all
visible map layers, walls, foemap and zones.
* Changes to key bindings so that you no longer need to press
Ctrl to switch the tool. A and B vehicle bits are now Ctrl+A/B.
* In wallmap mode you can now use the Box and Paint tools to
set any wall directions/bits
* You can select a block of tiles on the tileset to draw with
[Ralph]
* Bugfixes
* Fix the arrow key problem in Custom on Mac OS X for the third
time (this time for real!) [Ralph]
* Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5 are now supported again [Ralph]
* "run script by id" was far slower than it should have been [Ralph]
* ${H#} codes in text boxes are no longer limited to heroes that
are in the party.
* Bug 968: "Reset target stat to max before hit" attack bit takes
effect even if the attack fails due to elemental resistance or
"Show damage without inflicting" is set [Ralph]
* Fix inns called directly from textboxes with no shop, which were
restoring the party even if you refused to pay [James]
* zone at spot(X, Y, getcount) returned 1 less than the actual count
* Bug 973: Strange behaviour when closing one game and playing
another without quitting Game [Ralph]
* Loop points in module music work in music_sdl again (Windows only)
* Problems when Custom or a game was placed in a folder containing
spaces or other special characters, especially on Mac [Ralph]
* Shops no longer allow you to buy items if you don't have room for
them in your inventory [James]
* Fixed F12 screenshots on the following menus: Items, Spells,
Status, Equip, Order/Team, Shop, Save, Load [James, Ralph]
* Fixed shop-stock limits not working [James]
* "get hero stat cap" and "set capped hero stat" didn't work [Ralph]
* Bug 800: Choice boxes misplaced for autosized textboxes [Ralph]
* Fix a couple places where stat caps were not applied [Ralph]
* Bug 743: Unequipping items when stats have reached stat limits
is broken [Ralph]
* If your whole party died outside of battle (via harm tiles, spells,
items or "map cure") a game over wasn't triggered [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* If a script runs for a long time without "wait"ing you can now
interrupt it by pressing any key. [Ralph]
* New commands "set onetime" and "check onetime" that work similarly
to "set tag" and "check tag" [James]
* When browsing plotscripts in custom, you can jump to scripts by
typing more than just the first letter of the scripts name [James]
* "delete npc" as an alias to "destroy npc"
* HamsterSpeak syntax changes:
* "include" syntax is more lenient, like it used to be. Quotes
around filenames containing paths, upper case or spaces optional
* The characters '{', '}', '[', ']', '.' are now totally disallowed
* < and > can be used instead of << and >>
* "do" after a case is optional, and you may write case(else) ...
instead of else(...). Example:
switch (dir) do (
case (north, south) return (1)
case (else) return (0)
)
* "else if" is a shortcut which lets you omit a pair of brackets:
if (condition) then (...)
else if (condition 2) then (...)
else (...)
[Ralph]
* "enemy elemental resist as int" [Ralph]
* "hero Z", "NPC Z", "set NPC Z" [Ralph]
* "set hero stat cap" [Ralph]
* "wait for sound"
* Each of a hero's stats now has a base value in addition to
current and maximum values. See "base stat" in the Plotscripting
Dictionary for information. [Ralph]
* "get item maximum stack size" [Ralph]
* "door at spot", "suspend doors", "resume doors" [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
July 31 2012 [Alectormancy+2]
* Bugfixes
* An arrow key fix from Alectormancy+1 broke adding new sprite
sets in the sprite editor. This release fixes it properly.
July 27 2012 [Alectormancy+1]
* Bugfixes
* Fix the arrow key problem in Custom on Mac OS X
* Fix new enemy formations being filled with enemy 0 instead of
empty slots
* NPCs that are intended to disappear when a text box advances
no longer disappear when it first opens.
* Mac OS X version now defaults to your Documents folder instead of
defaulting to the Applications folder
* Fix "Distribute Game as Mac OS X App" when running on Windows
* Fix "Distribute Game as Debian Package" when running on Mac OS X
* Fix "Distribute Game as Windows Installer" when running from
Linux+Wine
* Fix distribute failures caused by trying to download support
utilities into read-only locations.
* Use curl when wget isn't available
* Update to Vikings of Midgard
Jun 15 2012 [Alectormancy]
* New Features
* Adjustable global HP thresholds for hero and enemy Weak states
(hero graphics and enemy desperation attacks) [Adam Perry]
* New in-game debug key: CTRL+F4 to view/edit/export the slice
tree with the slice collection editor [Ralph]
* A general game option to change how the inventory Autosort
option works [Ralph]
* Master Palettes menu: added export option [Ralph]
* Play-as-you-edit, AKA live previewing of games, with a new
"Test Game" option in Custom. Still unfinished! [Ralph]
* New debug key: press F5 in-game to access a menu where you can
reload various game data. Most useful when live-previewing a
game. The old F5 and Ctrl+F5 debug keys (free camera movement)
have been changed to F7 and Ctrl+F7. [Ralph]
* Ctrl+S in the map and tileset editors immediately saves.
(Moved old Ctrl+S (paint the screen) to Ctrl+W (ie. paint the
"window")) [Ralph]
* New general bitset "Attacks will ignore extra hits stat" [James]
* NPCs can now be assigned avoidance (wall) zones as well as
movement zones. The avoidance zones have precedence. [Ralph]
* Default NPC movement and avoidance zones can be set in the
General Map Data menu [Ralph]
* Distribute Game menu, where you can automatically package your
game to distribute to other people. [James]
* Distribute as Zip file
* Distribute as Windows installer
* Distribute as Debian Linux package
* Script trigger log: press CTRL+F10 in-game to cause triggered
scripts (not called from other scripts) to be logged to
script_log.txt. It might help to restart/reload the game
after enabling it if running scripts are missing. [Ralph]
* Formation sets can now be disabled by tag conditions [Ralph]
* Partial Unicode support, currently limited to the Latin-1
character set:
* A new default font which includes the Latin-1 characters
* Your operating system's native keyboard layout/text inputting
methods are used when entering text, both in Game and Custom.
The input is restricted to Latin-1, though of course you'll
need the characters in your font to see them.
(Does not work with the gfx_fb backend).
* Support for non-ASCII filename encodings while browsing
* HSpeak has better, full Unicode support. It automatically
recognises the encoding as ASCII/Latin-1, UTF-8, or UTF-16.
Script names and strings are dumbed down to Latin-1 on import.
[Ralph]
* New general bitset "Don't divide experience between heroes" [James]
* Bugfixes
* Wrong names used for reserve party heroes who level during
battles [Ralph]
* In the map editor, tile 0 on map layers did not correctly become
transparent after swapping map layers [Ralph]
* Fixed a whole lot of things which failed to immediately update
tags they were meant to (eg. the "unequip" and "items menu"
commands). Also tag changes didn't immediately update disabled
menu items and often didn't update disabled NPCs [Ralph]
* Menus didn't resize or scroll properly/immediately after items
were added/removed/enabled/disabled/selected, and similarly
the "set menu max rows" command was broken [Ralph]
* You can now type negative numbers more naturally. No need to
type a positive number and toggle it negative [James]
* NPC definitions weren't being saved by "save map state" and
the "Remember NPC data" option, and "delete map state" didn't
work on NPC locations/instances [Ralph]
* 'Set target stat to %' attacks were being affected by the damage
cap [Ralph]
* Harm tile mess:
* Harm tiles didn't affect non-visible heroes when the
caterpillar party was disabled (fix enabled only with "Harm
tiles harm non-caterpillar party" general preference bitset)
* Didn't trigger when crossing over them using walkhero with
distance more than 1 [Ralph]
* "export globals" was broken in strange ways [Ralph]
* "input string" would hide string 0 instead of the one it was
meant to; also changed the way the 'center' and position
arguments behave to make more sense [Ralph]
* Bug 942: Attacks didn't chain if they depended on a tag with
ID >= 128 [San]
* It was no longer possible to import BAM files [Ralph]
* In-battle music option 'silence' acted the same as 'same as
last map'. Broken since xocolatl! [Ralph]
* When "camera follows NPC" was used the camera lagged one tick
behind the NPC [Ralph]
* The pause key didn't pause battles anymore [Ralph]
* Bug 945: Attacks used from a hero's spell list out-of-battle
used the average party stats instead of that hero's [Ralph]
* Fix ${C#} codes in textboxes which have been (embarrasingly)
broken for as long as the feature has existed [James]
* Bug 956: gfx_directx: graphics could be mangled at startup
until the window is resized [Jay]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* You can now have global variables up to 16383 instead of 4095
[James]
* Slice velocity commands to make a slice move automatically at
pixels-per-tick speeds. [James]
* Slice movement commands to make a command move to a target
position over a desired number of ticks. [James, Ralph]
* "wait for slice" command to make the script wait for slice
movement [James]
* New "Ellipse" slice type, and related commands [James, Ralph]
* "NPCstat: default movement zone" constant for "read/alter npc"
* "assert" [Ralph]
* "menu item true slot", "menu item by true slot" [Ralph]
* "get hero slice" and "get NPC slice" commands [James]
* "get door x", "get door y", "get door destination id",
"get door destination map", "door exists" [Mogri]
* "get attack caption" [Mogri]
* "get rect fuzziness", "set rect fuzziness" [Ralph]
* "textbox line" replaces "string from textbox", fixing the
broken 'expand' argument and adding 'strip' argument [Ralph]
* "get slice text" [Ralph]
* "get input text" (and "enable input text") which obsoletes
"last ascii" [Ralph]
* "get hero hand x", "get hero hand y", "set hero hand x",
"set hero hand y", "get default hero hand x",
"get default hero hand y" [James]
* Increased number of strings to 100 (0 to 99) [Ralph]
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* Certain special engine-related Slices are marked as protected
to indicate that plotscripts are not permitted to delete or
reparent them.
* New comand-line options:
-autosnap N Automatically save a screen snapshot every N ticks
-runfast Run quickly (without speed control)
-autotest Run quickly and write screenshots on _checkpoints
-recordinput file Record keyboard input to a file
-replayinput file Replay keyboard input from a previously recorded file
-no-native-kbd Use US keyboard layout instead of OS-based text input
May 6 2011 [Zenzizenzic]
* New Features
* Ported to Mac OS X! (Intel Macs only) [Ralph]
* New general bitset "Locked heroes can't be re-ordered" [James]
* Slice collection editor can create complex collections of slices
to load into plotscripts [James]
* New general bitset, "Attack captions pause battle meters" [James]
* Savegames are now in a new format. Instead of a gamename.sav
file you will have a gamename.saves folder. (the conversion is
automagical and you will not lose any saves) [James]
* Rewrote script usage menu to be enormously faster and sort
scripts into numerical/alphabetical order [Ralph]
* You may now have up to 500 NPC definitions per map [Ralph]
* Maximum map size raised to 100,000 tiles [Ralph]
* New menu item bitset to suppress the on-load script if the
menu item closes the menu [James]
* New menu feature to automatically open another menu when you
close the current menu with ESC [James]
* Expanded (and fixed) Erase Map Data menu [Ralph]
* The line and oval tools are now pleasant to use instead of
teeth-gnashingly awful, and the pixels in the tile editor are
no longer stretched [Ralph]
* Added Replace Colour tool to tile and sprite editors [Ralph]
* New general bitset "Don't randomize battle ready meters" [James]
* New attack bitset "Delay doesn't block further actions" allows
attacks to be queued without blocking the attacker from taking
other actions [James]
* Jay Tennant's gfx_directx is now the default graphics backend
under Windows (automatic fallback to gfx_sdl on old computers).
Click the window icon to access gfx_directx's Options menu, and
drag the corner of the window to change zoom!
* gfx_directx input rewrite: adds joystick support, normal mouse
speed/acceleration, removes forced mouse clipping and adds
"mouse region" support [Jay]
* gfx_directx expanded hardware support [Jay]
* gfx_directx added option in Options dialog to disable system
messages (like Alt-Space) from operating--Alt-Tab and Alt-Enter
still function as expected [Jay]
* When using an item in the item menu, there is now visual feedback
when you use the last item in a stack. [James]
* Lots of new scancodes added for scripts: you can now, for example,
tell apart Numpad 2 and the Down key. You have to turn on the
general bitset "Enable better scancodes" for these to fully work,
see "key is pressed" in the dictionary for more details. [Ralph]
* New dissolve animations Squeeze, Shrink and Flicker [Ralph]
* Page up/page down/home/end keys now work in most built-in
in-game menus [Ralph]
* You can set a cap on the maximum hero level, from 0 to 99 [Ralph]
* (Anti-feature) The internal password format has changed a 3rd
time. Old utilities and versions of Custom will not be able to
open passworded games; remove the password to use them. [Ralph]
* Lots of element related stuff:
* Enemy, hero, and equipment elemental strong/weak/absorb bits
have been replaced with percentage-based "Damage from "
options. The second Status menu screen now shows percentages.
* Attack "Fail vs. resistance" bits have been replaced
with percentage-based elemental resistance failure thresholds.
* The enemy types have been replaced by elements 9-16: "Is
", "Bonus to " and "Fail vs. "
have been translated to elemental equivalents.
* In Battle System Options you can select from three formulae
for combining equipment elemental resistances into the
effective elemental resistances for heroes.
* You can now have up to 64 elements (you have to set a
higher number of elements before they become available).
[Ralph]
* You can select menu items on Custom's main menu and graphics menu
by hotkey (eg. I for Edit Items or Import Music) [Ralph]
* Ctrl+F8 debug to print out the slice tree to g_debug.txt
* Added Zones to maps. A zone is just a group of tiles on the map,
with data attached (sadly no triggers are implemented yet). There
are 9999 zones per map. Each NPC type may have a 'movement zone',
confining where it can move. [Ralph]
* Added drawing tools -- Draw, Box, Fill, Replace, and Paint
Tilemap -- to the map editor, available in Tile, Wall, Foe, and
Zone modes! [Ralph]
* Press Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y to Undo and Redo changes in the tilemap,
wallmap, foemap, and zonemap editors! These share a single
near-infinite history. Certain operations delete the history.
[Ralph]
* Attack maximum Extra Damage raised to 32767%
* You can customise the amount of experience given to heroes not
in the active party in the Battle System Options menu [Ralph]
* Import .hss files in Custom, and they will be automatically
compiled with hspeak [Ralph]
* You can now define enemy counterattacks against elemental
and stat-damaging attacks! Does not use the CTR stat. [James]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 749: Attacks configured to do No Damage still do damage when
used outside battle [James]
* Bug 819: %-based attacks don't heal outside of battle [James]
* Bug 9: Elemental strength/weakness/absorbtion is not yet applied
to spells used outside of battle. [James]
* Fixed a case where "add hero" could add more heroes than you
are supposed to be able to have under certain conditions [James]
* Bug 486: Chained attacks fail on stored dead targets
[James, msw188]
* Bug 851: Instead-chains fail or cause other chains to fail under
certain conditions [James msw188]
* Using an item that triggers a text box could cause a menu
double-close warning if the menu item that opened the items menu
was set to always close the menu [James]
* Bug 845: upgrading old games that contain no shop stuff lump
always produced a confusing warning [James]
* 'Set tag', 'Toggle tag' and 'Close menu' options were ignored
when menu items were triggered via "use menu item" [Ralph]
* NPCs appearance was not updated according to tags set from a
menu item or from the tag debug menu [Ralph]
* "create NPC" could create NPCs with garbage 'extra data' [Ralph]
* gfx_directx: fixed garbage and window resizing at startup [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed slow screen fades and framerate [Jay]
* gfx_directx: added support for all all key scancodes [Ralph, Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed fast keypresses being lost [Ralph, Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed keyboard/mouse clearing state leaving window [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed graphical errors in Vista/Win7 [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed Ctrl-Alt-Del crashes in Vista/Win7 [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed slow downs caused by leaving the window [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed window resizing/engine cursor issues [Jay]
* gfx_directx: fixed garbage occurring when enabling/disabling
Aspect Ratio Preservation in Options dialog [Jay]
* Your MP (and the rest of the spell menu) is no longer hidden
while you target a spell outside of battle. [James]
* Scrolling a sprite or a maptile is now done with the new scroll
tool instead of holding down the CAPSLOCK key, which was rather
annoying. You can now click and drag to scroll. [Ralph]
* Getting the maptile under the cursor is now done with the G key
(instead of the CAPSLOCK key, which we can all agree was
confusing!) [James]
* "string to globals" and "globals to string" weren't working
with global variable IDs > 1024 [Ralph]
* Bug 863: "load tileset" and "change tileset" did not
(completely) work on map layers 3 and above [Ralph]
* music_sdl no longer secretly keeps seperate volume levels for
MIDIs and non-MIDIs, which confused people and broke fading
scripts. [Ralph]
* Cursor, accept and cancel sound effects weren't used in battles
[Ralph]
* Could not exit from empty menus with Esc key [Ralph]
* Fixes to fatal error reporting: no longer gives the option to
continue if it means corrupting the game, and Custom no longer
deletes working.tmp, so that you can recover your work [Ralph]
* "horiz flip sprite" and "vert flip sprite" reset the sprite's
palette to default [Ralph]
* Trying to reorder map layers if there's only one crashed [Ralph]
* Bug 865: Slices attached to map layer 0 were drawn on top of all
map layers [Ralph]
* Fixed an assortment of 19 bugs in HSpeak: crashes, missing error
checking, miscompiling and misoptimising scripts, incorrect
error messages [Ralph]
* Bug 827: Flood fill in the sprite editors could count all pixels
of one colour around the sprite edges as connected [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* You may no longer used the characters ", $ or = in script and
variable names.
* "include" is parsed differently; enclose your filenames in quotes
if they contain spaces, a path, or are case sensitive
* "reset hero picture" and "reset hero palette" [James]
* "set slice clipping", "get slice clipping" [James, Ralph]
* "create grid", "slice is grid", "set grid columns",
"get grid columns", "set grid rows", "get grid rows",
"show grid", "grid is shown" [James]
* "load slice collection" [James]
* "add hero" command now returns the party slot it added the hero
to, or -1 if the party is full. [James]
* "set slice edge x", "set slice edge y" [James]
* "get slice lookup", "set slice lookup" [James]
* "trace value" [Ralph]
* "abs", "sign", "sqrt" [Ralph]
* "map cure" replaces deprecated "outside battle cure" [James]
* "read attack name" replaces deprecated "get attack name" [James]
* "spells learned" replaces deprecated "spells learnt" [James]
* "allocate timers" (removes 16 timer limit) [Ralph, James]
* New script trigger for when you close a menu. [James]
* "set npc ignores walls", "get npc ignores walls",
"set npc obstructs", "get npc obstructs", "set npc usable",
"get npc usable", "set npc moves", "get npc moves" [Ralph]
* "init mouse" no longer locks the mouse to the window
* "read zone", "write zone", "zone at spot",
"zone number of tiles", "get zone name", "get zone extra",
"set zone extra" [Ralph]
* "use item", "use item in slot" [James]
* "map width" and "map height" now take an optional argument,
the map number [Ralph]
* "mouse click"; you can test the middle mouse button now [Ralph]
* "extended scancodes enabled" [Ralph]
* Resolution of "get/set music volume" increased [Ralph]
* "get level cap", "set level cap" [Ralph]
* "load backdrop sprite", "replace backdrop sprite",
"set sprite trans", "get sprite trans" [Ralph]
* "hero base elemental resist as int",
"set hero base elemental resist",
"hero total elemental resist as int" [Ralph]
* Vikings of Midgard
* Stuff Only Developers Will Notice
* Test suite and benchmarks for RELOAD format [Mike]
* Comprehensive SCons-based build system, to replace all the others
[David Gowers]
* Generic resizable arrays ('vector's) to replace FreeBASIC's
horrible builtin arrays. This is why you should not rush
programming language features :) [Ralph]
Nov 8 2010 [Ypsiliform+3]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 816: Freeze on attack instead-chaining on multi-stage chains
* The "leader" command has never worked.
* "set dead heroes gain experience" did nothing.
* Bug 829: Shrinking a map could cause garbage map layers to appear;
also, deleting map layers did not work
* Script string literals were broken when playing games made in
late 2006.
* Bug 824: Back-compat issue with Curse of Vampire (affected other
games) [James]
* Cancel hero movement if hero speed is zero. Prevents a situation
where walking a zero-speed hero could get stuck in an infinite
battle loop [Ralph]
* "wait for all" did not wait for NPCs when it was meant to [Ralph]
* "hero pixel x/y" always returned the leader's position [Ralph]
* Fix display of the airbrush options in the tile editor. [Ralph]
* Music and sound effects can be previewed everywhere in
Custom by hitting Enter [Ralph]
* Prompt for confirmation before deleting a song or sound effect
[James]
* Under Unix you usually couldn't play unlumped .rpgdir games which
were on a mounted filesystem other than the one containing your
home directory [Ralph]
* Sound effects did not stop when quitting to the title screen or
loading a game [Ralph]
* Windows music/sound import fixes (bug 826):
* MP3/WAV import failed when Custom's path contained spaces
* Sometimes MP3/WAV import went bonkers, looping over and over
* MP3/OGG music couldn't be deleted or replaced with other OGGs
[Ralph]
Feb 8 2010 [Ypsiliform+2]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 815: Trailblazers Frozen
* Fix crash when saving an empty menu
Jan 24 2010 [Ypsiliform+1]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 802: tileset confusion when adding a layer
* Bug 812: crash after adding a new spriteset while in
full-set mode
* Bug 813: crash and map corruption when linking doors to a
map with more than 3 layers
* Bug 814: F12 for screenshots not working for SDL backend
* No longer prevents importing WAV files over 500k in size
(they often become smaller than 500k when converted to ogg)
* Fix missing "Quit Editing" on main menu
* Fix palette browser to update added palettes and to not
crash the sprite editor.
Jan 08 2010 [Ypsiliform]
* New Features
* Press F1 anywhere in custom for help [James, Ralph, Msw, NN]
* Plotscripting can now load sprites, and place them on screen.
[Mike, James]
* Limit on maximum items has been raised from 254 to 32000 [James]
* Limit on how many item slots you have in your inventory has been
raised from 198 to 600. You can also manually choose a smaller
maximum. [James]
* The hero editor now has an "Equipment" submenu which provides a
convenient way to choose which items a hero can equip without
needing to go back to the item editor [James]
* Text box "shrink" can now be set to Auto, so the vertical size
of the box is determined by the text in it. [James]
* Press + in the text box editor to create a new box with the same
style as the current box [James]
* ALT+C and ALT+V to copy/paste text box styles [James]
* Added "Connected boxes" navigation tool to the text box editor
[James]
* New enemy bitset "Never flinch when hit" [James]
* New enemy bitset "Ignore for "Alone" AI" [James]
* New attack bitselt "Do not cause target to flinch" [James]
* Attack target modes for "Thankvenge", just like Revenge,
but works on those who have cured the attacker instead
of those who have harmed the attacker [James]
* Last cure is now usable as an attack base stat [James]
* Option in Master Palettes menu to clone the active palette's UI
colour indices plus other data, without colour remapping [Ralph]
* Text box exporter escapes non-printable ascii as \NNN sequences
where NNN is the three digit decmal representation of the ascii
code [James]
* New general bitset "Don't save gameover/loadgame script IDs"
[James]
* New "check where scripts are used" tool, which can list all
script usage (except for scripts calling other scripts) [James]
* New "find broken script triggers" tool, which can list all
places where a non-existant script will be triggered. [James]
* The sprite editor now has a full-spriteset mode which allows you
to import (or manipulate) full sprite sets instead of working
one frame at a time [James]
* Press E in the sprite editor to export your sprite to a file
[Ralph, James]
* Press + and - in the sprite editor to rotate your sprite [James]
* The clone tool in the sprite editor now allows you to rotate the
cloned area. [James]
* The global text string editor now has a search tool [James]
* Show cursor coordinates in the sprite editor [James]
* g/c_debug.txt are deleted when quitting if nothing interesting
happened. Older output is moved to g/c_debug_archive.txt [Ralph]
* New general bitset "Dead heroes gain share of experience" [Ralph]
* Pressing Esc+PgDown+PgUp or clicking the window's X (or Alt+F4
and so on) in Custom quits all the way to the save/quit menu.
Pressing it again quits, saving the game as a .BAK file [Ralph]
* The General Game Data menu has finally been cleaned up [Ralph]
* Enemies can now have a cursor offset position so the cursor does
not always have to go directly over their head. [James]
* Extended attack chaining options. Now you can make an attack
chain based on a tag check or a stat check. [James]
* Else-Chain which is evaluated whenever the default chain is not
used [James]
* Instead-Chain which is evaluated right after the attack is
targeted, and if it succeeds it entirely replaces the orignal
attack [James]
* Damage display in battles can be customized to display longer
[James]
* Attack chain browser for navigating and visualizing chains of
attacks [James]
* Attacks now have a "Learned" sound effect that can be played when
the attack is learned as a spell from an item or levelup. [James]
* You can test enemy dissolve animations in the enemy editor [Ralph]
* The random scatter (default) enemy dissolve animation now fades
out smoothly and completely [Ralph]
* Added new enemy dissolve animations: Squash, Melt, Vapourise
and Phase out [Ralph]
* When a script error occurs, you are now shown the script callstack
and given options such as entering the slightly improved script
debugger. But many script errors still occur silently. [Ralph]
* Each text box can now have a sound effect attached. [James]
* F12 to take a screenshot, alt+tab to toggle fullscreen, and alt+F4
now work everywhere in Game and Custom with all backends [Ralph]
* Attacks can transmogrify enemies into different enemies [James]
* Menus are no longer limited to 21 items [Ralph]
* Maps may now have up to 8 layers. You can insert, delete, and
reorder layers and set the number of layers drawn beneath NPCs and
heroes. [Ralph]
* A new graphics backend, gfx_directx, which supports vsync, a
resizeable window, and other excellent improvements over the other
backends. All builds of the OHR include support for it, as long as
gfx_directx.dll is present.
Enable with the commandline option "-gfx directx" [Jay Tennant]
* Bugfixes
* Fix bug 325 "Cleaner upgrade from old-style to new-style scripts"
Now you can convert your scripts to new-style and the triggers
will be automatically updated for you. [James]
* Fix bug 449 "Some debug keys not reset when exiting back to the
game select menu" [James]
* Using "advance text box" when no text box is open no longer
re-evaluates the conditionals of the most recently closed text
box [James]
* Fix a crash bug in the script interpreter when running very
large/many scripts [Ralph]
* "random" didn't work when max - min > 2^31, and could be totally
non-uniform. "seed random" now causes different sequences! [Ralph]
* Using Ctrl+R in the tilemap editor could corrupt memory [Ralph]
* The tilemap editor fill tool, Ctrl+P, would overflow and crash
when filling huge areas [Ralph]
* Fixed box borders being drawn wrong for small boxes, and resized
boxes throughout the builtin menus to accommodate borders [Ralph]
* Fixed bug 747 which was causing hero tags to not be updated
immediately when a hero was added or removed [James]
* Fixed bug 756 "Holding ENTER or SPACE while dismounting a vehicle
can result the hero getting stuck" [James]
* The default master palette is also saved in the old format,
so old graphics utilities have a greater chance of working [Ralph]
* Fix crash on using items that teach spells which also have
textboxes selected (see Bug 750) [James]
* Fix bug 547, "Level MP" was missing from the list of global text
strings [James]
* Fix bug 588, Heroes get free attack if stunned while selecting a
target. Also fixed the fact that stun status was only pausing the
ready-meter, not pausing delays. [James]
* selectmenuitem and nextmenuitem did not work, unselected menus
didn't become inactive when the topmost menu was changed by script,
appendmenuitem sometimes added items in the middle of a menu, and
the order of menu items created by scripts changed in various
circumstances [Ralph]
* Renamed "Random Focus" attack target setting to "Random roulette"
to more accurately reflect what it does, and make sure it actually
behaves randomly when used in chains [James]
* EVIL bug 233 "OHR freezes on startup", unsolved for 3 years [Ralph]
* The default graphics backend has been changed to gfx_sdl. That
means the following gfx_fb bugs are gone:
* Bug 185 - Colors messed up in full-screen mode on some computers
* Bug 766 - Zonealarm thinks the OHRRPGCE is a keylogger
* Keypresses often blocked for a few seconds after switching app
* A whole lot of laptop keyboard problems seem to be gone or
less severe, eg. bugs 334, 785, and right shift key not working
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* "get inventory size" and "set inventory size" [James]
* "load hero sprite", "replace hero sprite",
"load walkabout sprite", "replace walkabout sprite",
"load small enemy sprite", "replace small enemy sprite",
"load medium enemy sprite", "replace small medium sprite",
"load large enemy sprite", "replace small large sprite",
"load attack sprite", "replace attack sprite",
"load weapon sprite", "replace weapon sprite",
"load border sprite", "replace border sprite",
"load portrait sprite", "replace portrait sprite",
"free sprite", "put sprite", "set sprite visible",
"get sprite type", "get sprite set number", "get sprite palette"
"set sprite palette", "clone sprite", "set sprite frame",
"get sprite frame", "sprite frame count", "slice is sprite",
"sprite layer", "horiz flip sprite", "vert flip sprite",
"sprite is horiz flipped", "sprite is vert flipped"
[Mike, James]
* "slice x", "slice y", "set slice x", "set slice y",
"put slice", "slice width", "slice height", "set horiz align",
"set vert align", "set horiz anchor", "set vert anchor",
"free slice", "slice child", "child count", "first child",
"next sibling", "last child", "previous sibling",
"free slice children", "create container", "check parentage",
"set parent", "parent slice", "slice screen x", "slice screen y",
"put slice screen", "slice is container", "set slice width",
"set slice height", "create rect", "get rect style",
"set rect style", "get rect fgcol", "set rect fgcol",
"get rect bgcol", "set rect bgcol", "get rect border",
"set rect border", "get rect trans", "set rect trans",
"slice is rect", "first container child", "next container child",
"first sprite child", "next sprite sibling", "first rect child",
"next rect sibling", "realign slice", "center slice",
"slice collide point", "slice collide", "slice contains",
"slice at pixel", "find colliding slice", "lookup slice",
"set slice screen x", "set slice screen y", "clamp slice",
"set padding", "set top padding", "get top padding",
"set left padding", "get left padding", "set right padding",
"get right padding", "set bottom padding", "get bottom padding",
"fill parent", "is filling parent", "slice to back",
"slice to front", "Y sort children", "set sort order",
"get sort order", "sort children", "set slice extra",
"get slice extra", "slice edge x", "slice edge y", "create text",
"set slice text", "get text color", "set text color",
"get text bg", "set text bg", "get outline", "set outline",
"set wrap", "get wrap", "slice is text", "slice is valid",
"set slice visible", "get slice visible", "move slice below",
"move slice above". [James, Ralph]
* "number from string" [James]
* "set dead heroes gain experience" [James]
* There are now 3 NPC extra data fields (0-2) accessible with
"set NPC extra" instead of 2 [Ralph]
* "suspend timers", and "resume timers" [James]
* "use menu item" [James]
* "reset game" [James]
* Inventory manipulation commands: "item in slot", "set item in
slot", "item count in slot", "set item count in slot" [James]
* "update level up learning" [James]
* hspeak now automatically stores a backup copy of your script
inside the .hs file. Use the -n command line option if you
want to disable this feature [James]
* Calling initmouse now causes on-keypress scripts to be run when
the mouse is clicked, and restricts the mouse to the game window
so that you can actually move it to the edge. You can let the
mouse leave the window with mouseregion. [Ralph]
* Vikings of Midgard
* More story scenes for the plot to unfold more naturally.
* Enemies and elemental system completely revamped.
* Even MORE subquests to explore.
* "complete" up to the "world of ruin" part of the game.
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* New slice routines for rectangular objects of various styles that
can be organized into a tree and positioned and sized relative to
one another. [Mike]
* RPG format number has been incremented to provide
forward-compat warnings when loading new RPG files into
old versions of game [James]
April 03 2009 [xocolatl+2]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 684: Lower half of inventory screen gets deleted when you
load [James]
* Bug 348: Weapon is drawn behind other heroes [James]
* Bug 689: When a hero who is currently picking a target dies,
next hero's targetting was broken [James]
* Bug 698: Global variables 1025-4095 couldn't be set [Ralph]
* "input string" was causing an endless loop if ESC was
pressed and "suspend player" was active [James]
* Bug 703: NPC extra's aren't cleaned on restart [James]
* Bug 700: Erroneous globals over 32767 when loading form save game
[James]
* Bug 710: Text box import loads door tag value into door id [James]
* Bug 712: default plotstring colors are wrong after a
non-title-screen load [James]
* Bug 674:A line of pixels is sometimes "vomited" into the corner
of the sprite editor [James]
* Removed obsolete warning about long filenames from relump
* Removed obsolete unneeded linux-specific hacks from unlump
* Bug 646: Delay before caption doesn't seem to work [James]
* importglobals and exportglobals did not work on globals
1025 - 4095 [Ralph]
* Plotscripting
* Show a future compatibility warning when using certain punctuation
such as [square brackets] or {curly braces} in script names or
variable names. This is to ease the transition for scripters when
arrays become available.
October 03 2008 [xocolatl+]
* Vikings of Midgard
* Character portraits [Fenrir-Lunaris]
* New spell quests [Fenrir-Lunaris]
* Other minor fixes [Fenrir-Lunaris]
October 02 2008 [xocolatl]
* New Features
* Spells and items used outside of battle now display their
target stat instead of always displaying HP [Mike]
* Visual placement of hero's hand positions and weapon's
handle positions. [James]
* Text boxes can be exported as a .TXT file, edited with
your favorite text editor or spellchecker, and then
re-imported back into your game [James, Mike]
* Character portraits! You can now draw 50x50 pictures for
heroes and NPCs that can be displayed in text boxes [James]
* You can now type in NPC numbers in NPC placement mode in the
map editor [James]
* You can now type in formation set numbers in foemapping mode
in the map editor [James]
* Draw your own graphical Text Box borders [James]
* NPC-per-map limit raised from 36 to 100 [James]
* New text box conditional to display menus [James]
* New menu bitset to advance any open text box when the menu
closes [James]
* New attack bitsets
* "Don't trigger spawning on kill" [James]
* "Check costs when used as an item" [James]
* "Re-check costs after attack delay" [James]
* Bugfixes
* bug 678: Ogg music problems in game with werewaffle version
[James]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* get hero speed [MCW]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* Many old variables re-organized into types
* Many GOSUB blocks converted to SUBs (many still remain)
* The code to automatically fade songs in and out has been
removed. It wasn't cool enough to warrant the headaches
it caused [James]
August 20 2008 [werewaffle+]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 669: Music continues to play when you exit back to the game
browsing screen
* Bug 670: Sound effect cache not flushed on game exit
* Bug 671: Lingering ogg file prevents playing.tmp cleanup
August 16 2008 [werewaffle]
* New Features
* While editing the tilemap of a map, use Ctrl+P to fill in the
current maptile and all maptiles of the same type touching
the current maptile with the selected maptile. This is analogous
in functionality to the paint can tool in most modern drawing
programs. [Cameron Wilkin]
* Mark/Clone brush tool in the sprite editor and the maptile editor.
Mark a rectangular region of a sprite and then use the clone tool
to duplicate it. [James Paige]
* Press F5 in the browser to refresh the listing, and to fetch the
names of all drives (under Windows); this is no longer done
automatically as it was too slow.
Press backspace to go up a directory.
Also sped up, and removed the 255 file limit. [Ralph Versteegen]
* New default Master Palette for new games. [NeoTA, Everybody]
* ohrrpgce.mas is no longer required at all, not even for
custom [James Paige]
* New attack bitset, "Can't be cancelled by other attacks" [James]
* New attack bitset, "Do not trigger spawning on hit" [James]
* *Vastly* reduced CPU usage due to allmodex and gfx_fb graphics
code rewrites [Ralph Versteegen]
* The script interpreter runs about 4 times faster on average
than Ubersetzung! (work ongoing) [Ralph Versteegen]
* Holding down the F12 key takes a screenshot every frame [James]
* Item descriptions show in-battle too [Ralph Versteegen]
* Full view option in backdrop & tileset import/export menus [Ralph]
* Fancy improved Map Layers menu (still also available by Ctrl-L)
* Each tilemap layer can now use a different tileset. [Ralph]
* You can cut from tilesets as well as backdrops; hit enter or
middle click to quickly cut a tile or sequence of tiles; hold
down shift to keep the cut box 20x20 tile aligned while moving
the mouse. [Ralph]
* Formation editor improvements; animations are shown now [Ralph]
* Shops display whether or not your heroes can equip weapons or
armor [James]
* Menu scripts on menus with the "suspend gameplay" bit turned on
receive extra menu data as arguments. (Menu scripts on normal
menus still receive a menu item handle) [James]
* Debug keys: Ctrl+F1 lets you teleport to any position on any map
instantly, using an easy minimap. Hold shift to speed about.
Ctrl+F11 to overlay NPC id and (negated) reference numbers.
Ctrl +/- for changing the framerate work again. Ctrl+~ to see
the FPS - this works everywhere. [Ralph]
* New enemy bitset, "Win battle even if alive" [Ralph]
* New sound effect triggers: Learnt from item, Can't learn, Buy,
Hire, Sell, Can't Buy, Can't Sell [Ralph]
* New aim math options for purely percentage based aim/dodge rates:
Aim%, Aim% * (100-Dog)%, Mag%, Mag% * (100-Mag)% [Adam Perry]
* The mouse is usable for drawing now: the frame rate in the sprite
editors has been maximised (used to be 9fps!) [Ralph]
* Bugfixes
* Bug 585: Curative items used wrong attack after being arranged
* Custom now respects your chosen UI colors everywhere [James Paige]
* Bug 590: default death sound effect played after every hit
* Attempting to display a blank global text string, or the "fail"
message in certain cases, would crash under Linux, and "fail"
wouldn't display under Windows [Ralph Versteegen]
* Importing a new master palette could black out or fail to
remap UI colours. [Ralph]
* unlump and relump on Linux now correctly handle uppercase
rpgdirs [James Paige]
* Bug 605: array-out-of-bounds when playing sound effects when
no more sound effect slots are free [James Paige]
* Bug 577: Memory corruption when opening sub-menus [James Paige]
* Bug 608: New menus were checking equipment tags when the menu
opened instead of when the menu closed
* Bug 612: Problems with animating tiles on a map, including
potentially corrupting the map.
And changing the tileset didn't reload tile animations [Ralph]
* Bug 603: Shops ignore default item value for buy/sell prices
[James Paige]
* Bug 625: 'Damage instead of set' % based attacks now respect
the cure and harmed by cure bitsets [Yuriy, Ralph]
* Just about all missing sound effects added (any more missing?),
some wrong ones fixed [Ralph]
* Battle Music: silence now works again
* set formation song now actually works [Ralph]
* Bug 586: Textbox backdrop can become the tileset with showtextbox
without advancetextbox
* Bug 432: "use door" sometimes goes through the door you are
standing on instead of the intended one [Ralph]
* Bug 481: "hero levelled" and "spells learnt" don't reset after
running from battle. Also some other problems with inactive heroes
not reporting from the very last command/battle only [Ralph]
* Bug 637: Crash when editing doorlinks [Ralph]
* Bug 639: Enemies which spawn with 0hp or 'Die Without Boss' and no
bosses now die immediately, without being shown. [Ralph]
* If you try to use a tile with multiple NPCs on it, the bottommost
use-activation NPC is triggered instead of failing if the
bottommost NPC isn't usable. [Ralph]
* Fixed the bug that prevented you from using the joystick buttons
to confirm certain prompts, for example, when learning a spell
from an item [James]
* Fixed Bug 650: One-time-use NPCs and tag-disabled NPCs no longer
block pushable NPCs [James]
* Bug 379: Enemies couldn't use Target: Self attacks if they had
"Untargetable by Enemies" set [Ralph]
* Sound effects should hopefully be less laggy now (music_sdl)
* Fixed Bug 626 Bitsets altered (memory corruption) after reaching
maximum number of Menu Items [James]
* Preferred target weak/strong stat setting now works [Ralph]
* New Plotscripting Stuff
* You can now have up to 4096 global variables (global ID numbers
0-4095) [James Paige]
* loadtileset, gettileanimationoffset, settileanimationoffset,
animationstarttile, currentdisplaytile now take layer arguments.
"change tileset" and "layer tileset" also added for layer tilesets
* Changed get formation song and set formation song have to not use
a +1 offset for songs, and can handle "same as map" song. This
only affects recompiled scripts [Ralph]
* add enemy to formation, delete enemy from formation,
find enemy in formation, formation slot enemy, formation slot x,
formation slot y, get formation background, set formation background,
last formation, formation set frequency, formation probability,
random formation [Ralph]
* current text box
* Vikings of Midgard
* New and updated locations
* New heroes and abilities
* New and improved graphics
* Characters now join the party through story events rather than being
hired in the pub.
Jan 21 2008 [voxhumana]
* New Features
* Attack bitset 'Do not chain if attack fails' [Mike Caron]
* Equip screen displays the number by which a stat will change [James]
* -s pixel smoothing now works with all bit depths, not just 8-bit
[Reaxor Jones]
* Attack bitsets to disable specific target slots now work for enemies
also [James Paige]
* Attacks can have preferred default targets based on factors such as
distance or strongest stat or weakest stat [James Paige]
* Customizable main menus. [James Paige]
* New attack bitset "Cancel target's attack" [James Paige]
* A hero for hire in a shop can (optionally) be given a specific
experience level [James Paige]
* New, customizable enemy dissolving styles [Mike Caron]
* Tag name editor lets you browse tags at a glance, rather than
searching for them by tag number [James Paige]
* Browse for tags from any menu that takes tag numbers by pressing
enter or space on the tag [James Paige]
* Most (but not all) user interface colors in Game and Custom can now
be customized. Each master palette has its own set [Simon, James]
* User Interface color editor. [James Paige]
* In the door link editor, you can see a preview of each doorlinks
when you browse the list of doorlinks. [James Paige]
* Door link editor only shows the links that are actually used [James]
* Press Enter on a door in door-placement mode to go directly to the
doorlink editor for that door. (only works on the first link for
doors multiple conditional destinations) [James Paige]
* Enemies can have a death sound effect. [James Paige]
* TeeEmCee's pretty mini-map from the map-resize menu is now used for
all mini-map drawing [Ralph, James]
* General bitset to disable pressing ESC to run from battle [James]
* Bugfixes
* Temporary map state was not being deleted when exiting to the title
screen, meaning maps set to remember state would be in an unexpected
state from a previous game. deletemapstate was also broken.
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 257 "Mute status effect broken for enemies" [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 5 "First Target attacks can hit targets besides the first"
[James Paige]
* Fixed bug 476, off-by-one-error in "set victory music" [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 484 "Do not show spell lists if empty" was only working in
battle for the first spell list [James Paige]
* Having an after-battle script would prevent fightformation from
returning the correct battle result [Ralph Versteegen]
* More NPC activation/pushing over map edge fixes [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 237, "Stun Attacks Cancel Actions"
(Old stun attacks will continue to work the same thanks to the
"Cancel target's attack" bitset) [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 473, "Shop data doesn't persist" [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 330, "Pushed npcs are obstructionless" for new games.
Old games can get the fix in the general game bitsets menu by turning
off the "Simulate pushed NPC obstruction bug" bitset. Do this
with caution if your game uses pushed-NPC puzzles that rely on
overlapping NPCs [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 21, "If you save on a door, you will go through the door
when you load" [James Paige]
* Outside-battle attacks that target only dead heroes no longer
work on the first hero slot when no dead heroes are present
[James Paige]
* Attacks with target class "Enemy" are usable on allies
outside battle if the "Usable outside battle" bitset is ON
[James Paige]
* Life spells/items that are not allowed to target live heroes are
no longer usable on a hero who you just revived. [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 553, "Cancelling level MP attack in battle still uses
cost for that turn" [James Paige]
* Input string actually works now! [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 576 incorrect camera movment and vanishing hero when
using "focus camera" close to the top or left edge of a map
[James]
* New Plotscripting Commands
* There are **71** new commands for manipulating customisable menus,
too many to list! [James Paige]
* get victory music
* outside battle cure
* get level mp, set level mp [James Paige]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* BattleStats UDT [James Paige]
* New sprite paradigm (currently used in battle) [Mike Caron]
* A lot of minor clean up in many places
Sept 21 2007 [ubersetzung]
* New Features
* New sample game! Fenrir Lunaris's modern retro epic fantasy masterpiece
Vikings of Midgard! [Fenrir-Lunaris]
* New Music Formats. In addition to BAM and MIDI, you can also play
MP3, OGG, MOD, XM, S3M and IT [Mike Caron]
* New NPC movement type: Walk In Place [James Paige]
* 8-bit bitmaps can now be imported as backdrops and tilesets [Mike, Ralph]
* Sound effects. in WAV, OGG, or MP3 format [Mike Caron]
* Sound effect triggers in battle [Mike Caron]
* Attacks can now consume or give items (up to three at once!) [Mike Caron]
* "Transparent" colour in sprite editor can now be chosen (only affects the
sprite editor, so you can distinguish "transparent" from "black") [Mike]
* New functionality for the key is pressed() command, pertaining to
joysticks [Mike Caron]
* Browse menu (game + custom) now shows a drivelist under windows and lets
you browse to root [Ralph Versteegen]
* Press Ctrl + H while browsing to display hidden files and folders
[James Paige]
* Press a key in the browser to cycle through files and directories with
that first letter [Ralph Versteegen]
* Browse menu displays unlumped RPG files if the folder is named
with a .rpgdir extension [James Paige]
* You can choose an RPG to edit in custom with the same browse menu
that you use to pick an RPG to play in game. [James Paige]
* Custom can edit and save unlumped RPG files [James Paige]
* Full Long file name support (You can create RPG files with long file
names, even including spaces)
* Minimap now zooms in closer on smaller maps [James Paige]
* Activating an NPC who is walking away from you causes the
NPC to step back closer to you, preventing the ugly situation
where you are talking to an NPC who is standing a full tile
away [James Paige]
* Maps can be set to remember their state when you leave them, or to load
from state files saved with savemapstate. You can set separate loading
options for NPC and tile data. [Ralph Versteegen]
* HamsterSpeak is now 32-bit. This means you can use values from
-2147483648 to 2147483647 in your scripts [Ralph Versteegen]
* $id="..." and $id+"..." (string literals) rewritten to be speedy and
efficient [Ralph]
* HSIMPORT is now obsolete, and Custom has taken over its function.
Specify an RPG file/folder and an HS file on the commandline (or drag-
and-drop them onto Custom), and the HS file will be imported [Ralph]
* Add -z 3 to the command-line to run with a 3x zoomed screen. This
Only works when running in a window, not when running fullscreen
[James Paige]
* You no longer need to give your scripts ID numbers; definescript is now
optional. Instead, you can use this syntax to define default values for
script arguments:
script, myscript, required arg, optional arg = 3, begin
And to declare a script that's selectable in Custom use "plotscript"
instead of "script":
plotscript, introduction, begin
See http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/New_syntax
for more information. [Ralph Versteegen]
* Press enter/space on any field that accepts scripts to enter a script
browser where you can enter an id or browse by starting letter [Ralph]
* The sprite editor remembers a default palette for every sprite
[James Paige]
* You can use the Home/End keys in the sprite editors and browse by typing
in shop/item number
* You can import multiple master palettes and switch between them while
editing in the View Master Palettes menu and with scripting. Master
Palettes can now also be imported from the palettes of 8 bit BMP files,
and from 16x16 24-bit BMP files [Ralph Versteegen]
* Plotscripting Strings no longer have a max length of 40 [James Paige]
* New commands for dealing with 32-bit colors (0-255, as opposed to 0-63)
* Map music can be set to "same as previous map" and battle music as
"same music as map", previous "none" option renamed to "silence" [Ralph]
* Script buffer overflows are a thing of the past! Only a script larger
than maximum size (very generous) will cause an error. [Ralph]
* Tile map layers! In the map editor, use Ctrl-L to enable the new layers,
Alt-F1/2/3 to enable/disable them quickly, and Ctrl-F1/2/3 to toggle their
visibility. Press Ctrl+J to make the current layer jiggle so it stands
out from the other layers [Mike, James]
* You can export backdrops and tilesets as 8-bit BMP files [Ralph]
* Press DEL in the map editor to delete the current tile
Press BACKSPACE to delete tile, passability, npc, door, and foemap
for the current tile [James Paige]
* New zooming map resize screen to add or trim from any edge [Ralph]
* Hero start location is visible in the map editor. Press CTRL+H
to move the start location [James Paige]
* Optional graphics smoothing. Run with -s command-line option.
[Reaxor Jones]
* ohrrpgce.fnt is not used anymore. [James Paige]
* You can play two different RPG files at the same time and they will not
clobber each other's temporary files [James Paige]
* Linux version can be installed system-wide, for example, to /usr/games
[James Paige]
* Editing a read-only RPG file copies it to your home directory.
[James Paige]
* New general bitset to disable default passability by default
[James Paige]
* In the tile map editor you can press CTRL+R to replace every tile
like the selected one. [James Paige]
* Weapons can optionally require MP, HP, money or items, just like
spells do (a new attack bitset) [James Paige]
* Hold down Shift in the map editor to scroll quickly. [Ralph Versteegen]
* Bug Fixes
* Fixed bug 12: "An NPC at the edge of a wraparound map does not block the
hero at the opposite edge" and bug 27: "NPCs cannot walk across the
edges of a wraparound map" (consider that a feature if you want)
And bug where couldn't activate touch activation NPCs over map edge
And bug where avoid and chase NPCs did not know about wraparound maps
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Really fixed the "script arguments overflow into local variables" bug.
You need to recompile your scripts to get this fix [Ralph Versteegen]
* Joystick didn't work at all in the Windows version [Mike]
* Bug 68: Added days, hours, minutes to Global text Strings menu
for displaying playtime on the Save/Load screens [James]
* Fixed missing harm tile flash [James]
* Bug 155: "File browsing error: changing drives" [Ralph]
* Read-only and system folders are now browseable. [James Paige]
* Fixed catastrophic freezing on some computers for gfx_fb and gfx_fb2
backends [Ralph Versteegen]
* While playing games in windows mode, the [X] in the top right corner
that closes the window actually works now [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 11, which caused the hero to moonwalk backwards around
the map if you dismounted certain types of vehicles at the edge of
the map. [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 200, script errors and strange random behaviour when
activating the place were an already-activated one-time-usable
NPC was standing [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 210, HP and Gold costs are deducted more than once, and are
randomized [Mike Caron]
* Fixed bug 203, script interpreter crashes
* Fixed bug 226 Battle gets stuck when fighting a single jumping enemy
with the "pause on all battle menus" bitset is on
* Fixed bug 272 (Skip title screen makes input go nuts) [Mike]
* Fixed bug 274 (Ascii from string: position off by 1) [Mike]
* Fixed bug 240 (Background animations taking old unused formation data)
[James]
* Fixed bug 59 (Vehicle mount/dismount buggy if leader is not in first
slot in party) [Ralph]
* Fixed bug 184 "Dead" enemies can be attacked over and over again
* "current song" now always returns -1 when no music is playing
* Fixed bugs 30 and 58, both relating to weapon handle/hero hand points
[Mike]
* Fixed bug 321 (HSpeak crash with empty parentheses) [Ralph]
* Fixed bug 322 (Z position of enemies in battle randomness and
inconsistency between custom and game) [Ralph]
* Fixed bug 178 (Spell descriptions overrun menu box) [Ralph]
* Fix for bug 341 "After battle, the music speeds up" [Mike]
* Fix for bug 113 "Empty spell lists should not appear in Game" [Mike]
* Better command argument checking to fix crashing when moving/teleporting/
creating NPCs and heroes over map edge, and other non-fatal missing checks
that allowed loading invalid heroes, items, tilesets, shops and graphics.
And fix crash when standing next to map edge. [Ralph Versteegen]
* New Plotscripting Commands
* New HamsterSpeak flow control commands: break, continue, exit script,
exit returning, switch (and case). See the HS Definition for details
[Ralph Versteegen]
* New HamsterSpeak reference syntax. A script name or global variable
name preceded by an @ symbol will compile to the ID number of that
script or global. [James Paige]
* "string from textbox" [Yuriy]
* "hero frame", "NPC frame" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "get hero stat cap", "set capped hero stat"
* "load menu"
* "set [days/hours/minutes/seconds] of play", "get seconds of play" [Mike
Caron]
* "npc extra", "set npc extra" [Mike Caron]
* "load sound", "free sound", "play sound", "stop sound", "pause sound"
[Mike Caron]
* "search string", "trim string" [Yuriy]
* "joystick button" and "joystick axis" [Mike Caron]
* new built-in logic command not() [James]
* new math operators "&&", "||", "^^" (and, or and xor respectively). These
are logical operators, as opposed to the bitwise "and", "or" and "xor"
operators. [Mike]
* "wait for scancode" [Mike Caron]
* "save map state", "load map state", "reset map state", "delete map state"
[Ralph Versteegen]
* "party money", "set money" [Ralph]
* "get tile animation offset", "set tile animation offset",
"current display tile", "animation start tile" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "check hero wall", "check NPC wall" [James Paige]
* "set timer", "stop timer", "read timer" [Mike Caron]
* "string is visible" [James Paige]
* "set/get color", "rgb", "extract color" [Mike Caron]
* "load palette" [Ralph Versteegen]
* HSPEAK no longer produces a warning for while(true). Endless while loops
were already useful, and the new "break" flow control command has
made them even more useful.
* "main menu" [James Paige]
* "total experience", "set experience", "experience to next level",
"experience to level" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "milliseconds"
* Unlump.exe
* Ported to FreeBasic [Mike Caron]
* Output directory defaults to gamename.rpgdir [James]
* When run without arguments, tells windows users to
drag-and-drop [James]
* Can be used to unlump other lumped files too [Ralph]
* cleans up on error [Ralph]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* FreeBASIC 0.16b and newer support [Ralph]
* Removal of some QuickBasic-specific code
* New common.bas for code shared by game and custom
* New util.bas for code that does not depend on any other part
of the OHR
* Some rewritten map wrapping code [Ralph Versteegen]
* Rewritten Game & Custom map loading and saving [Ralph, James]
* Internal data formats for NPCs rewritten with UDTs [Mike]
* Same for inventory [Ralph]
* Internal data formats for battle sprites (heroes, enemies, attacks)
rewritten to use UDT's (in-progress) [James Paige]
* Hspeak's exit code is 2 if there were warnings [Mike Caron]
* Use keyval(-1) to detect when the OS has requested the program
to exit
* New internal master palette format has higher colour precision: 8 bits
instead of 6, and multiple palettes [Ralph]
* Experimental gfx_sdl graphics backend (may eventually become default
on Linux) [James Paige]
* Added UDTs for Hero data [Mike]
* Fixed browse$ to use UDTs [James]
August 03 2006 [hasta-la-qb+]
* Okay, we lied. The last update wasn't nearly stable enough to
be the final DOS version.
* Fixed bug 220: "Hero plotscripting commands broken" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Backported Ralph Versteegen's thread safety fixes [James Paige]
* Backported unlump.exe and relump.exe [James Paige]
July 09 2006 [hasta-la-qb]
* This is the final version to support a real DOS version (GAME-QB and
CUSTOMQB) You should be using the Windows or Linux versions already
anyway.
* New Features
* Input string gets 3 new arguments, center, positionx, positiony.
It also behaves a little different now. [Yuriy]
* Hspeak.exe now waits for a keypress when finished, which should avoid
a lot of confusion for new plotscripters who are unfamiliar with
command-line tools. Also added -k option to supress this new
behaviour [James Paige]
* Memory usage of the QB build has been trimmed a little. Requirement
for game-qb.exe is now 552kb [Ralph Versteegen]
* Bug Fixes
* Fixed a few bugs in inputstring, including backspace not working,
missing length checking and ESC popping up the menu [Yuriy, Ralph]
* Fixed bug 163, a random crash in the music import screen. [Simon, Mike]
* Bug 176: "Some files appear as subdirectories in Windows browsers"
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed an ancient bug in both the Sprite editor and the MapTile editor
which caused the keyboard control to lag whenever the mouse cursor
was over the drawing area. [James Paige]
* Bug where filling in colour 15 (white) on edge of a tile filled in all
colour 15 pixels on the edge. [Ralph Versteegen]
* Bug 179: "Use of two keyispressed conditions in an if statement causes
massive weirdness" - "keyispressed" command has been changed so that it
now only returns a bool. It may help to recompile your scripts. If you
want the old behaviour, use the new "keyval" command [Ralph]
* "NPC X","NPC Y" and "NPC at spot" behaviour has been corrected: an
NPC's position is now the tile its top left corner stands on [Ralph]
* Bug 43: "OHR randomly locks up on the hour" [Ralph]
* Fixed a bug in "alter NPC" and "set NPC speed" that caused the
wrong NPC to be changed if used with an NPC reference [James Paige]
* Bug 174: "Quick keypresses and mouse clicks lost in FB port" [Ralph]
* Fixed a bug in "read NPC" and another bug which were causing script
interpreter errors like "clean noop" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed script interpreter to return "1" for true in comparison operators
instead of -1 (for consistancy elsewhere) [Mike]
* New Plotscripting Commands
* "keyval"
* An existing command we forgot to mention in whatsnew: "string compare"
Mar 15 2006 [tirgoviste]
* New Features
* Stat caps [Mike Caron]
* "% based attacks damage instead of set" attack bitset [Mike Caron]
* Precise weapon placement. (use . and , to choose which
frame to edit) [Mike Caron]
* NPC Placement Editor now shows the copy number of NPCs (the bottom
number) [Mike Caron]
* Bug Fixes
* Pausing the music will probably cause "stuck notes" (i.e. notes that never
get turned off) if any notes are playing at the time [Mike Caron]
* Browsing for a replacement song, and cancelling deleted the existing song.
[Mike Caron]
* Rewards in battle are rewarded multiple times. [Mike Caron]
* Linux: specifying a file on the command line now works even if the file
is in a different directory. [James Paige]
* Windows: bug 140 keyboard handling quirks [Simon Bradley, James Paige]
* music_native now supports volume [Mike Caron]
* fixed bug 143 and bug 150 which disabled some spells you should have
been able to use, and permitted usage of some spells that should have
been disabled [James Paige]
* fixed bug 151 which was causing shops in non-upgraded RPG files to
expect random trade-in items for all purchases [James Paige]
* fixed bug that prevented the name of a spell learned from an item from
being displayed [James Paige]
* New Plotscripting Commands
* get/set formation song [Mike Caron]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
Feb 16 2006 [serendipity+]
* Emergency update to fix bug 138 (out-of-control file growth when
creating a new RPG file) [Simon Bradley, James Paige]
* Emergency fix to a bug which deletes all song names when 99th song
slot was in use [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed a bug in battle background animation [Mike Caron]
* Fixed a hidden bug in running unumped RPGs [Mike Caron]
* Fixed OoB spells [Mike Caron]
* Fixed broken item-rewards display in battles
Feb 15 2006 [serendipity]
* New Features
* !!! Native Windows port of GAME.EXE [Simon Bradley] !!!
* !!! Native Windows port of CUSTOM.EXE [Simon Bradley] !!!
* You can copy and paste different sized sprites across the sprite
editors, and while you are drawing a sprite you now paste and
transparent-paste at the current cursor position instead of
top left corner [Ralph Versteegen]
* Attack bitsets to disable certain target slots on an
attack-by-attack basis. [James Paige]
(Unfinished! Only works for heroes right now, see bug 102)
* Animated backdrops in battle [Mike Caron]
* Attack bitset to force the heroes to run away [James Paige]
* General bitset to "Disable Hero's Battle Cursor" [Yuriy]
* Attack option to set a tag (with a number of options relating
to what triggers the tag, and conditional to another tag)
[Mike Caron]
* Added damage cap option (in General Game Data) [Mike Caron]
* Spell Descriptions! (set in Attacks->Appearance) [Mike Caron]
* Mute status affliction (and a bitset to make a spell mutable)
[Mike Caron]
* New attack bitsets:
Fail if target is [poisoned/regened/stunned/muted]
(so you can't mute someone twice, for example) [Mike Caron]
* In Attack editor and Enemy editor you can hold ALT and press
left and right to navigate records from anywhere in the menu
(This feature will eventually be added to other menus also)
[James Paige]
* Text box editor no longer sucks! You can insert, delete, and
edit anywhere in the line of text without needing to delete the
end of the line. [James Paige]
* New Import Music menu. This means:
* The 100 song limit is gone
* You can import .MIDs as well as .BAMs (and as we support more
music formats, you will be able to import them too.) You can
only play midis in FB GAME + CUSTOM.
* Export and delete songs
Until QBOHR is dropped, you can have a BAM fallback version of
any MIDI file you import. Just import a MIDI over top of a BAM.
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Music looping:
* RPG Maker style (Midi event #111 (0x6F) at the loop point), or
* OHR Music Code style (for more details see
http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Music_Code )
[Mike Caron]
* Unlumped RPGs can now be played by Game (start game like this:
game foldername)
* Midi versions of many of the public domain pieces in the Import
folder have been added as alternatives [FyreWulff]
* You can specify upto 4 different items required to trade for an
item in a shop, and can set the amount required of each. Also can
set amount of items you recieve for trading in at a shop.
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Bug Fixes
* Fixed bug 107: "An MP~ stat over 66 makes all spells free"
[Ralph Versteegen]
* In the plotscripting dictionary, NPCcount was described as
returning number of npcs at spot with NPCatpixel or NPCatspot.
This is incorrect, the constant getcount does this (and more).
* c and v no longer appended to a string when copying and pasting
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Renamed attack bitset "No Reward from target" to
"Erase rewards (Enemy target only)" to clarify that it
happens even if the attack does not kill the target
* Fixed off by one bug in "get attack name" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Buggy "set enemy rewards" and "get enemy rewards" commands removed,
use (previously undocumented) "read enemy data" and "write enemy
data" instead (you can use the same constants)
* Fixed bug 13: "No math overflow checking in battle"
And bug 66: "Absorb-damage type attacks cannot drain a percent"
[Mike Caron]
* Worked around bug 78: "Using Custom under DosBox dosen't allow for
browsing certain areas." by avoiding the use of VAL() which is
buggy in some versions of DosBox and QEMU [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 98: "plotscript commands that alter enemys [sic] persist
after quitting" [Mike Caron]
* You can now no longer import invalid BAM music even though a
warning is given [Ralph Versteegen]
* Using formation sets 100+ no longer crashes game [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 24: "Numbering is wrong for backdrops and songs in the
text-box appearance editor" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bugs in numerous menu items where typing in a number entered
incorrectly [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 109: "Passing NPC references to alternpc crashes GAME"
[Yuriy]
* Fixed bug 136: "Use of quotes in BAM import list causes weirdness"
by scrapping .SNG storage scheme [Ralph Versteegen]
* New Plotscripting Commands
* "cancel map name display" [James Paige]
* "suspend map music", "resume map music" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "seconds of play", "set days of play", "set hours of play",
"set minutes of play", "set seconds of play" [Mike Caron]
* "read NPC" (counterpart of alter NPC) [James Paige]
* "set hero level", "give experience", "hero levelled",
"spells learnt" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "get damage cap", "set damage cap" [Mike Caron]
* "get music volume", "set music volume" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "trace" [Mike Caron]
* "get song name" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* More attack bitsets [Mike Caron]
* Unified item-name editor data (all item slots are formatted the
same now) [Mike Caron]
* New MIDI driver [Mike Caron]
* Native Linux port mostly working (games are playable and editable,
Browsing still has some problems, espeically in music importing,
and full-screen causes problems) [Simon Bradley, James Paige]
* .SNG lump replaced with binary expandable songdata.bin
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Incremented RPG file version to 6. (Game only shows backwards
compatability warnings when loading files in version 4 or older)
[James Paige]
October 03 2005 [rusalka]
* Bug-Fixes
* Fixed bug 18: "In the map editor, CTRL+F doesn't use default
passability" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 76: "Hitting two keys at the same time allows you to
overflow text-entry fields" [James Paige]
* Fixed a bug that allowed argument values to pre-fill local
variables in scripts that did not have enough arguments declared
(It is now safe to assume that all your local variables will
start out set to zero) [James Paige]
* Fixed bug 81: "fight formation() with an invalid formation would
start a battle which would immediately end" [Yuriy]
* To bring up the Joystick calibration screen, you should now
press CTRL+J rather than just J
* Fixed bug 85: "menu called when exiting a script triggered menu or
screen with ESC" [Yuriy and Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 86: "Foot offset is not taken into account when culling
npcs and heroes to draw onscreen" [Ralph Versteegen]
* Fixed bug 88: "A script buffer overflow crashes or freezes game.exe
instead of displaying an error message" [Ralph Versteegen]
* "NPC is walking" now returns true when the NPC is walking and false
if not walking. Used to be backwards. Old compiled scripts that
depended on the backwards behaviour will still work as they did
before, but you will have fixed them if you recompile them.
[James Paige]
* New Features
* plotscripting commands to read system time: system hour, system
minute, system second. [Mike Caron]
* plotscripting commands to read system date: system day, system
month, system year. [Yuriy]
* plotscripting command to find out the currently playing song.
[Mike Caron]
* plotscripting command run script by ID which does just that
[Ralph Versteegen]
* status indicators (poison/stun) via characters appended to stats
in battle [Yuriy]
* "No reward for targets killed" bitset (useful for monsters "running
away") [Yuriy]
* Command to get the ASCII code of a key being pressed (last ascii())
* importglobals behaviour extended: importglobals(slot,id) returns
the value of a global without overwriting anything
* Strings! Specifically:
* New commands:
show string(string ID)
clear string(string ID)
append ascii(string ID, ascii code)
append number(string ID, number)
copy string(dest string, source string)
concatenate strings(dest string, source string)
string length(string ID)
replace char(string ID, position, ascii)
delete char(string ID, position)
ascii from string(string ID, position)
string to globals(string ID, starting global, length)
globals to string(string ID, starting global, length)
[BIG HUGE thanks to Yuriy (Draknight2@wmconnect.com)]
* New operators for strings:
destid $= srcid instead of copy string(destid,srcid)
destid $+ srcid instead of concatenate strings(destid,srcid)
Please note that id $+ "TESTING" is NOT valid
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Commands to get useful strings:
get hero name(string, hero)
set hero name(string, hero)
get item name(string, item)
get map name(string, map)
get attack name(string, attack)
get global string(string, global)
input string (string, use current)
[Mike Caron]
* Commands to display strings on the screen:
show string at (string, x, y)
center string at (string, x, y)
hide string (string)
string style (string, style)
string color (string, color, background color)
position string (string, x, y)
string X (string)
string Y (string)
[James Paige]
* ${S#} Meta String for textboxes
* Support in HSpeak for "auto strings":
$1="My string"
That will set the string with ID 1 to "My string"
* get enemy name, set enemy name
get enemy stat, set enemy stat
get enemy appearance, set enemy appearance
get enemy rewards, set enemy rewards
[Mike Caron and Yuriy]
* Map limit increased from 100 to 32767 maps
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Transparent tile and sprite pasting in all graphics editors.
Copy a sprite normally, then paste it with Ctrl + T. Transparent
(colour 0) areas will not get pasted [Ralph Versteegen]
* You can now use capslock + directional keys to move a tile around
like you can in the sprite editor. In the tile editor however,
pieces of the tile that go over the edge wrap around to the other
side [Ralph Versteegen]
* Place tiles without overwriting passability with the default by
hitting Ctrl + D when tilemapping [Ralph Versteegen]
* Attack bitset to ignore attacking hero's/enemy's Extra Hits
stat [Ralph Versteegen]
* Plotscript command alternpc has been considerably optimised. It
no longer reloads all npcs and heros on the map [Ralph Versteegen]
* New plotscript commands: get map tileset, get ambient music,
set ambient music, allow minimap, allow save anywhere, set map
edge mode, get map edge mode, set harm tile damage, set harm tile
flash, get foot offset, set foot offset, get instead of battle
script, set instead of battle script, get each step script, set
each step script, get on keypress script, set on keypress script,
draw npcs above heroes, map width, map height [Ralph Versteegen]
* New general bitsets: skip title screen, skip load screen (which
can be set or off in any combination), pause on all battle menus
[Ralph Versteegen]
* Stuff only Developers Will Notice
* Plotscripting Dictionary Documentation is now in xml format instead
of html (but still exportable to html) [Big thanks to Mike Caron]
* Constants for the gen()/general() array data [James Paige]
* Combined save- and load- menus to save memory (about 3.7kb) and
make future changes easier [Ralph Versteegen]
May 19 2005 [quaternion]
* GPL Licensed source code. See LICENSE.txt
* Added += and -= operators to Hspeak, thanks to a patch from
The Mad Cacti and Fyrewulff
* "Inns don't revive dead heroes" bitset now works on all Inns (bug 23)
* "Level up for (hero)" and "(#) levels for (hero)" battle text is now
customizable (bug 46)
* Fixed misspellings of "enemies" as in plotscripting commands "suspend
random enemies" and "resume random enemies" (Misspelled versions
still work for backwards compatability)
* New plotscripting commands: save in slot, last save slot, auto save,
save slot used, import globals, export globals, load from slot,
delete save. Thanks to Ysoft-entertainment and Ralph Versteegen
(TeeEmCee)
* It is now possible to display the save menu without actually saving
using "save menu (false)"
* New plotscripting commands: init mouse, mouse pixel x, mouse pixel
y, mouse button, put mouse, mouse region, NPC at pixel
Thanks to Ralph Versteegen (TeeEmCee)
* Very nice plotscript buffer usage optimization. Scripts that run more
than once take no extra space in the buffer, allowing you to write
recursive scripts without fear of buffer-overflow. Thanks to Ralph
Versteegen (TeeEmCee)
* Bugs fixed thanks to help from Simon Bradley
* "equip where" plotscripting command always uses hero #0's
equipability data no matter which hero you specify
* Bugs fixed thanks to help from Ralph Versteegen (TeeEmCee)
* bug 1: item-based stat increases go away after level-up
* bug 32: blank exp/gold box after battle when you earn no exp/gold
* bug 47: Off by one bug in assigning script buffer and heap wastes
memory
* bug 54: Aim math text for Magic damage in CUSTOM is incorrect
* Bugs fixed thanks to help from Mike Caron (pkmnfrk)
* bug 40: Maps can be resized to invalid dimensions
* bug 35: enemy spawned backwards in place of"flee-instead-of-die"...
* bug 20: CUSTOM does no error checking for NPCs that point to text
boxes that have been deleted
* bug 63: Crash when trying to rename a hero not in party
* Code cleanup (things that only developers will notice)
* Cleaned up build system to make it possible for people other than
me to compile if they can get ahold of a copy of QuickBasic 4.5
* (Partial) Support for compiling with QuickBasic 7.1 thanks to Mike
Caron (pkmnfrk) and Ralph Versteegen (TeeEmCee)
* Massive indentation cleanup thanks to David Gowers (NeoTA)
* Assembly DECLARE cleanup (moved to to allmodex.bi) thanks to Simon
Bradley
June 28 2004 [ozarks]
* Everybody who has worked so hard to try to plotscript this is
going to simultaneously hate me and love me for this, but now
it is possible to choose whether heroes get drawn over NPCs or
NPCs get drawn over heroes. Look in the "General Map Data" menu
* The general game data screen now has a separate sub-menu for
password entry that explains the low-security nature of RPG file
password protection.
* Changed internal password storage format into something easier
for third-party utility authors to support.
* Fixed a bug that caused a crash if you typed a comma as the
first letter of an RPG file's filename either when creating a
new file or renaming an existing one. Totally re-wrote my
DOS-filename-typing code so that I trust it to be reliable now
* Added a few more missing customizable global text strings.
"THE INN COSTS (# gold)", "You have (# gold)", "CANNOT RUN"
* pressing ESC on the "Discard Changes and Quit?" menu cancels the
quit rather than confirming it
* fixed a math overflow in the "random" plotscripting command when
the difference betweeen the low and high limits was greater than
32767
* Quick program exit keys PgUp+PgDown+ESC now work inside battle
* Plotscripters rejoice! Added plotscripting commands: use shop,
status screen, show mini map, spells menu, items menu, equip menu
save menu, order menu, team menu
October 05 2003 [paternoster]
* NPCs can now be activated across the edges of a wraparound
map
* Fixed caterpillar hero walkabout graphics to be correctly
displayed over the edges of a wraparound map.
* Improved the F12 BMP-format screenshot feature to take
screen shots virtually anywhere in GAME.EXE rather than
just on the map or in battle. Now you can take screen
shots of menus, title screen, whatever. (no such capability
in CUSTOM.EXE, sorry)
* Fixed the "put hero" plotscripting command so it now works
for all heroes instead of just the leader
* Made the "Found a (item)" and "Found (number) (items)"
victory captions customizable.
* Fixed a bug that caused the PAUSE key to be disabled in
battle if Debugging keys were disabled
* Fixed a bug that could cause recently drawn graphics to be
lost under certain conditions when pressing CTRL+BACKSPACE
to delete picture sets in the sprite editor
* Now if a hero has zero maximum HP it will not die. This
prevents the game from ending after you exit the menu
on games where the heros have not been given any stats
(for example, games that do not use battles)
August 04 2003 [wolfwood]
* Fixed the bug that premitted you to cast MP-based spells
in battle even when you did not have enough MP
* Fixed the bug that resets the hero's picture and palette to
zero if the hero is renamed when added to the party
* It is no longer possible to get invalid item 255 (item 254
is the last item)
* Added plotscripting commands: set victory music, get death
script, set load script, get load script, set battle wait
mode, set caterpillar mode, set no HP level up restore, set
no MP level up restore, set inn no revive mode, set full
hero swap mode, hide battle ready meter, hide battle health
meter, set debug keys disable
July 31 2003 [espereble]
* The Focus stat (MP-cost-reduction stat) now works
* Fixed the bug that caused enemies that die from poison to
vanish instantly rather than fading
* Fixed the bug that caused the battle to end after killing any
enemy with the boss bitset, even if other bosses or non-die-
without-boss enemies were still alive. Also fixed the bug
that caused die-without-boss enemies to double-die when the
boss died if you had already killed them previously
* Added the (optional) ability to allow players to rename heros!
You can enable this feature for specific heros in the hero
editor under "Bitsets". Heros can be renamed when the are
added to the party or on the status screen.
* Added plotscripting commands "rename hero" and "rename hero by
slot"
* Added the ability to embed hero names in text boxes by typeing
special codes that will be replaced with the names.
${C#} is replaced by the name of the hero at position # in the
caterpillar party. So if you want the leader's name,
write ${C0}
${P#} is replaced by the name of the hero at position # in the
party
${H#} is replaced by the name of the first copy of hero ID#
* Added the ability to embed global variables in text boxes by
typing the special code ${V#} where # is the global variable's
ID number
* Added plotscripting command "pick hero" that pops up a hero
picker like the one you see when you go into the Equip menu
or the Status menu. The return-value of this command is the
hero that you picked (their position in the party)
* The correct "Equip Who?" caption is now used when the Equip
menu is opened from inside a shop
* Added the ability to copy maps in the map editor. Now when you
pick "Add new map" you get a choice between "New Blank Map" or
"Copy of Map N"
* Changed the way temporary files are cleaned up to work around
the "...The operating system is denying access to the files in
playing.tmp" error that occurs sometimes for some people.
* Added "If this problem persists, manually delete playing.tmp"
to the "...The operating system is denying access to the files in
playing.tmp" error message (just in case the other fix doesn't
solve all cases)
* Fixed an off-by-one bug in the "change NPC ID" plotscripting
command. If you were already using this command in your scripts,
you may need to change them (it is no longer neccisary to add 1
to the ID number, and it is no longer impossible to change the ID
to 35)
* Fixed the bug which caused enemies to die if cured over 32767 HP.
I believe there are still other math-overflow errors in battle
which could cause crashes or incorrect behavior for extremely
strong attacks or enemies and heros with extremely high stats.
If anybody finds such a bug, please send me a testcase.
* I have been misspelling the word "enemies" for years. If anybody
catches me saying "enemys" please yell at me.
* When you switch to a different map with the same music, or enter
a battle with different music, the song does not restart from the
beginning, it continues playing without interruption. You can
force a song to restart with plotscripting by doing a "stop song"
followed by a "play song"
* Switched back to the old version of MIDI2BAM. The new one in the
handshake update caused more problems than it fixed.
* Fixed a bug that occured in games that have caterpillar party
disabled. Walking over harm tiles would damage the empty spaces
behind the leader where other heros would have been if caterpillar
was on.
* Fixed a bug that caused items marked as "cannot be sold/dropped"
to be consumed if you learn a spell from them
* Fixed the bug that prevented the attack with ID 0 from working in
spell lists
* Fixed two bugs with the text-char-picker. One, that it would
insert an extra space along with every char, and second that it
would ignore the text-length limit
Nov 29 2002 [handshake]
* I decree that henceforth all updates will have silly codenames.
This update shall be known as "handshake" in thanks to everybody
who helped me solve the NT/2000/XP bug.
* Fixed The crash on exit in GAME.EXE under Windows NT/2000/XP
If you still have an old locked playing.tmp file left over from
the previous version, you may need to manually delete it once
first before the new version will run.
* Fixed the bug that prevented consumable items that teach spells
from being consumed
* Added plotscripting command "load tileset" to dynamicly change
the tileset of the currently loaded map.
* Fixed a crash when viewing the status screen for certain heros
in some games (Powerstick Man, for example)
* I neglected to mention in the last update that I added an option
for "Base DEF stat" in the attack editor.
* Also, In the last update I mistakenly said the text-char picker
thingy was bought up by pressing ALT+SPACE. This was not true, it
was actually SHIFT+SPACE, but in this update I have changed it to
CTRL+SPACE, because SHIFT+SPACE was so easy to accadentally trigger
when TYPING A LINE IN ALL CAPS (is everyone sufficiently confused
now?)
Nov 23 2002
* Made the text "(hero) has no spells" customizable. Are there any
more text strings that I missed?
* Fixed the mini-map when shown from a shop so it works like the
mini-map from the menu or F1
* Added an attack target type that can only target dead heros.
* Added pixel-perfect positioning plotscripting commands; put hero,
put npc, put camera, hero pixel x, hero pixel y, NPC pixel x, NPC
pixel y, camera pixel x, camera pixel y
* Fixed a bug that caused the hero to become misaligned with the
maptiles if you tried to mount a vehicle that was already moving
* Added "Save and continue editing" to the "Exit" menu.
* GAME.EXE and CUSTOM.EXE can now both detect when you attempt to
run a second instance of the program without first closing the
first.
* Added plotscripting commands "hero by slot" and "hero by rank"
which are the opposites of "find hero" and "rank in caterpillar"
* Added plotscripting commands "teach spell", "forget spell",
"read spell", "write spell", "knows spell", and "can learn spell"
* Added a caption when you teach a hero a spell from an item
* Updated HSPEAK.EXE to tolerate the corrupted line-endings
sometimes inserted into scripts under Windows XP
* Due to popular demand, set-to-percentage type attacks now display
the difference between the old and new value of the target stat
(use the "do not display damage" bitset if you want the old
behavior)
* Added an attack bitset for damage that is calculated and displayed
but not actually inflicted. Good for "scan" type spells
* Elemental bitsets on equipment now works
* Added Elemental Strength/Weakness display to the Status screen in
GAME.EXE. Press the "Use" key to toggle it on and off. Press the
"Cancel" key to exit status.
* Added Poison, Regen, and Stun afflictions in battle. To use them,
create attacks that target the new "Affliction Register" target
stats. For example, damage done to the Poison Register will be
repeated as poison damage. Damage done to the Stun Register will
become the number of seconds that the target is stunned. There is
currently no visual indicator of afflictions! That will be added
later.
* Greatly improved the font editor. You can now edit 224 text
characters, copy and paste, and import/export font files. Added
three importable sample fonts in the IMPORT directory, ASCII,
Japanese, and Cyrillic.
* Added a character-picker accessable from any text-entry
field by pressing ALT+SPACE [Edit: CTRL+SPACE]
* Added "Import New Master Palette" feature to "General Game Data"
menu. Now you can directly import new palettes created with Neo's
PalEdit and 2MAS utilites (note that importing a new palette screws
up all your existing graphics, so this is only really useful for
new RPG files)
* Various memory optimizations, in an attempt to further
reduce the "Not Enough Conventional DOS Memory" threshhold.
* Fixed the "set default weapon" plotscripting command
* Fixed the broken "Require Tag" feature in shops
* Fixed the crash that could occur after reloading the
default passability of a large map.
* Fixed bugs involving showing the tileset in GAME.EXE. If you spot
any more situations where a tileset displays, a backdrop fails to
display, or a map fails to reappear after a backdrop, please let
me know
* Fixed the bug that made it impossible for a script containing a
"wait for key" command to terminate when run on a map with an
on-keypress script active .
* Fixed the on-keypress script handler so you can hold down a key
without suspending all your other scripts. I am pretty sure that
this will not break anybody's existing on-keypress scripts, but
do let me know if you have any problems.
* Fixed a bug where if you were holding down a key and then tapped
a second key without releasing the first key, the on-keypress
script handler would not be triggered even though the first key
was still down
* Fixed an obscure plotscripting error that could cause strange
behavior after running a _very_ big script.
* Various trivial bugfixes
Feb 27 2002
* The last sound fix solved the problem for some people, but not
everyone. Hopefully this willget sound back the way it was in
June 11 2002
Feb 25 2002
* Scrounged around to free up a K or two of memory to lower the
"Not Enough Conventional DOS Memory" threshhold, which has been
slowly creeping upwards as I add features
* Fixed a bug that cause the map tileset to be displayed if you brought
up the menu while a "show backdrop" plotscripting command was active
* Fixed the bug that prevented NPCs from being drawn over the edges
of wraparound maps
* Scrapped the changes to the music-setup that did card autodetection
and INI reading altogether. They broke music for many people, and I
did not get one single report of them fixing music for anybody.
The soundcard is now blindly detected exactly as it was back in the
June 11 2001 version
Feb 19 2002
* A change in the soundcard code that will hopefully fix the new
sound problems introduced in the last update. (if it doesnt, I
will regress to the June 11 2001 sound code.)
* Yet-another-fix for the "Dont restore HP/MP at levelup" feature,
which has probably been the most buggy feature in the history of
the whole program. I am fairly confident I got it right this time :)
Feb 14 2002
* Fixed a bug that caused wait commands under certain circumstances
to wait one game cycle longer than they needed to. This should
make some complex plotscripts run a little smoother
* Fixed a bug that prevented you from getting items from battle if you
impatiently held down the button to skip the victory messages
* Joystick calibration info is now saved and restored to the file
JOYSET.INI so you do not have to re-calibrate each time you play.
Note that the joystick will still not be activated unless you use
a joystick button to advance the title-screen of a game
* Added a menu option in the map editor to re-load the default
passability for the entire map
* Saved games now correctly save and restore the positions of all four
heros, rather than just the leader.
* Fixed a bug introduced in the June 8 2001 version that caused
plotscripts to lock up if you attempted to use a "wait for NPC"
command on an NPC who didnt actually exist on the map.
* Implemented stealing. To try it out, make an attack with the
"Steal item" bitset turned on, and make sure to give your enemys
some stealable items in the enemy editor.
* Changed the F6 debug key. Now instead of uselessly panning the camera
to the center of the map, holding the F6 keys allows you to pan the
camera freely with the arrow keys (F5 to return to the hero)
* Added error checking for accessing out-of-range global script
variables (variables with ID numbers higher than 1024)
* Brian fixed the ASM code for importing BMP files so imported sprites
no longer lose their rightmost row of pixels. Yay!
* Re-wrote the Attack Menu and the Enemy Menu to save memory and make
future alterations easyer. Any small differences you see in these menus
are a result of the rewrite
* Re-enabled copy and paste while editing graphics with CTRL+C and
CTRL+V. Moved palette copying and pasting back to ALT+C and ALT+V
* Added Attack Captions that can display at the bottom of the screen
when you use an attack
* Re-fixed the "Do not Restore HP on Levelup" bug that had
resurfaced AGAIN. Added lots of comments to the code to prevent me
from messing it up again :)
* Added the ability to unequip one item at a time
* Fixed the bug that prevented the default weapon for being equiped when
you unequip a weapon with a plotscript
* Greatly improved crash trapping. If GAME.EXE or CUSTOM.EXE crash
they will now display useful error messages and terminate cleanly,
rather than the old behavior of garbling the screen and locking up :)
* Fixed a crasher in the item menu in GAME.EXE when you moved the cursor
to the right from the very bottom of the menu
* GAME.EXE can now read an alternate address to search for a soundcard.
To try this out, download http://HamsterRepublic.com/dl/bam_port.zip
and read the included .TXT file. (I expect that this will only
help a very small subset of troubled BAM users)
* Fixed the bug that prevented heros fourth spell list from working
if it was set to type: Random
* Almost every single menu in CUSTOM now supports PGUP PGDN HOME END and
wraparound (the only noticeable exception is the stat menu in the
hero editor)
* Password entry is now starred-out to protect from spys who peek over
your shoulder
* Expanded the "Edit Global Text Strings" menu to allow you to change
every bit of text in your game. Let me know if I missed anything.
(and I probably did miss a few things)
* Fixed bug that caused the game to appear to lock up if you pressed the
menu key right when you walked through a door (the menu was appearing
and blocking the fade-in)
June 11 2001
* Repaired the glaring bug in the last version that caused corruption
in the graphics editor when the UNDO buffer overflowed (and in the
process, found a way to make the UNDO buffer 5 times bigger :)
* Expanded the "Edit Stat Names" menu to become the "Edit Global Strings"
menu that gives you the ability to change many other fixed-text strings
in GAME.EXE. Eventually all strings should be customizable, but this
will be a gradual process over the next few updates
June 8 2001
* Cleaned up the hero spell list editor into a two-column menu where
you can actually type in all the values
* You can now type in the enemy number in the formation editor
* Improved map-picking menu to show long map names and support
PGUP and PGDN
* Fixed bug that prevented music from playing when you quit and reload
a saved game on a map with the same music
* Fixed battle lockup when "pause on battle menus" is enabled and a
hero dies when a menu is up.
* Added a vehicle bitset to disable the shadow when you are flying
* Updated the plotscript compiler to support := as an alternate to
"set variable" (If for some strange reason you are still using the
old HSPEAK version 1, this might cause some compatability problems.
If you are using the old HSPEAK let me know, and I will help)
* fixed a crasher caused by passing an out-of-range NPC ID to certain
plotscripting commands
* fixed a bug that prevented tag-dependant NPCs from immediately
appearing after their tag changed
* fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to get stuck mid-movement when you
bring up the menu or a text-box
* Added two plotscripting commands for getting NPC references which you
can store in variables for later use with most other NPC-related
commands. Manipulating NPCs by reference is faster than manipulating
them by ID, and references allow you to manipulate any copy of an NPC
not just the first one on the map. The new commands are "NPC reference"
and "NPC at spot"
* Updated the following plotscripting commands to accept NPC references
in addition to NPC ID numbers: waitfornpc,setNPCframe,camerafollowsNPC,
NPCx,NPCy,walkNPC,setNPCdirection,setNPCposition,NPCdirection,
NPCiswalking,walkNPCtoX, and walkNPCtoY. AlterNPC and setNPCspeed do
_not_ support NPC references because they both change data that is the
same for every copy of the same NPC on the map
* Added new plotscripting commands getNPCid,NPCcopycount,changeNPCID,
createNPC, destroyNPC, useNPC, and getherolevel. See the plotscripting
dictionary for more info.
* Added an UNDO feature to the Maptile editor and the Sprite editor
(keyboard shortcut CTRL+Z for both)
* Fixed several plotscipting commands that accept values returned
by "find hero". When "find hero" cannot find a particular hero
it returns -1. several commands were treating the -1 like a 0,
and therefore affecting the leader when the should have been
doing nothing at all. If you have a script that used to work fine
but stops working right in this version, check that you are
correctly using the "find hero" command
* PAUSE key no longer behaves like the USE key
* Fixed a crasher in the Equip menu in games that have no items.
* Fixed broken "suspendoverlay" and "resumeoverlay" plotscripting
commands
* An assortment of other minor fixes
May 22 2001
* Added scancode.hsi plotscript include file that contains friendly
names for the scancodes for use with "key is pressed"
* Fixed a bug that allowed you to start a new game without triggering
the new-game script if the first save slot was empty but another save
slot had been used
* You can now import entire tilesets from 24-bit BMP files just like
you import backdrops
* Under Windows 9X/ME/NT/2K (and also OpenDOS and _maybe_ OS/2),
CUSTOM.EXE can now read filenames longer than 8 letters when
browsing BAM and BMP and HS files to import. Long filenames for
RPG files are still _not_ supported.
* Added new debugging key F10 that shows plotscript interpreter
status.
* Added plotscripting commands "hero is walking", "NPC is walking"
* Fixed spelling of "suspend caterpillar" and "resume caterpillar"
plotscripting commands. the old misspelled versions still work for
backwards compatability
* Added load-game plotscript trigger so you can choose a plotscript
that will automatically be run every time you load a saved game
* Added three map-specific plotscript triggers, instead-of-battle,
each-step, and on-keypress.
* Added a chapter on different ways to trigger a plotscript to
plotscripttutor.html
* Fixed the hero-is-leader tag
* Fixed an error that caused "script # became stateless" (and other
errors) when scripts where double-activated
* Fixed a bug in the "set hero picture" command that bounded the max
walkabout picture you could set your hero to by the max number of
hero battle pictures
* Misc small bugfixes
April 5 2001
* Added a nice 16-color-palette-browser that you can use top pick
your palette. In the sprite editor it is accessed by clicking on the
palette number or pressing P. You can also use it in the hero, enemy
attack, item and NPC editors by pressing ENTER on the palette number
* Fixed a bug-that-made-me-feel-very-stupid that was causing the
hero picture/palette setting commands crash
* Fixed palette-preview bugs in the NPC editor and the Attack editor
* Fixed the "dont hide hero" vehicle bitset
* Fixed a bug when using the CAPSLOCK key to choose a tile in maptile
mode when the tile you where picking was animating
* CUSTOM.EXE will now correctly load and use an altered master palette
if your RPG file contains one (there is currently no built-in support
for changing the master palette, but there are third-party utils that
can change it)
* Added a nag-screen to CUSTOM to remind people to make backup copies
of their work, in the hopes that future data-lost tragedies might
be averted :(
March 31 2001
* Added plotscripting commands: set hero picture, get hero picture
set hero palette, get hero palette, read global, write global
* Maximum 16-color palettes is now 32767 instead of 99. (and they
take less memory than before too!) This change required a total
rewrite of the palette handling system, so be on the lookout for
palette related bugs and report anything you find.
* Fixed scrolling/clipping problems in the map editor after
resizing or deleting a map
* GAME.EXE no longer crashes trying to open a read-only RPG file
(this means it should now be possible to play RPG files off a
CD-ROM)
* Fixed the bug that prevented files from showing up when their
"Archive" bit was turned off
* Fixed a bug in HSPEAK.EXE that caused it to compile to the wrong
output file when you tried to compile a script file with no filename
extension
* If GAME.EXE fails to find OHRRPGCE.FNT then it loads the system
8x8 ROM font instead
* GAME.EXE shows its version number on the file-select screen
* really fixed the "dont restore HP/MP on levelup" bitsets. Honest!
I tested it! both on and off! It really finally works the way it is
supposed to! ... I hope :)
Feb 27 2001
* After battle, gold and experience only display if you actually earn
more than zero
* Added a battle formation preview in the formation set editor
* Typing in a number in the formation set editor is no longer
off by 1
* Ally-including-dead target type now works outside of battle
* If two heros use the same item at the same time in battle, only
the first one will succeed and the item count will not go negative
* Fixed a menu bug in the shop editor when a shop contains both
items and heros
* double-triggering a script that is already currently running now
silently fails without displaying an error message or interrupting
the running script
* Added a general preference bitset to permit double-triggering
of a script that is already currently running (a good way to make
your game crash if you dont know what you are doing :)
* PageUP and PageDOWN work on the item editing menu in CUSTOM
* Larger animation buffer in battle to avoid lockups like the one
in ORIGIN
* Fixed reversed "Horizontal" and "Vertical" NPC pushability types
* No longer able to name non-existant tags over 999
* Fixed a longstanding bug that caused scripts to crash if you tried
to return() a value
* fixed hero's fourth spell menu
* correctly handle case-insenstive name conflicts in exported HSI files
* Fixed equipwhere plotscripting command
* Heros are now correctly Y-sorted
* NPCs with zero speed do not get stuck when forced to move
* You can now set default pasability data in the maptile editor that
will automatically be applied to tiles as you place them on the map.
Regular wallmapping-mode in the map editor is still available unchanged
for making exceptions and fine tuning your pasability.
* A new, much faster, better optimizing, version of the HSPEAK.EXE
plotscript compiler (HssED has also been updated)
* Added 13 more classical songs to the free BAM collection,
thanks to JD Shear
* Fixed RPGFIX.EXE to run in true DOS
* a few misc trivial fixes that nobody will notice
December 9 2000
* Enlarged the collection of free BAM music, with many thanks to
Shael Riley
* Added Text-search in the Text Box editor
* Strengthened error-checking for corrupted data
* Fixed a lockup bug in the hero appearance menu
* Fixed bug that prevented the "dont restore HP on levelup" and
"Dont restore MP on levelup" bitsets from working properly
* Announces when you learn a new spell from a levelup
* You can get multiple levelups after one battle if you earn enough
experience
* Added new damage base-stats "previous attack", "Last damage to
attacker" and "Last damage to target"
* Added new target classes "Revenge (last hit)", "Revenge (Whole Battle)",
"Previous Target" and "Stored Target"
* Added attack bitset "Store Target" that memorizes the target for use
with later "Stored Target" class attacks.
* Added attack bitset "Autotarget" that picks a target automatically
when used by a hero
* Percentage damage now displays the amount it changed the target stat
(unless the "Do Not Show Damage" bitset is turned on)
* Cancelling a BMP import import in the sprite editor no longer
asks the palette question
* Fixed missing spread-ally-not-self and spread-ally-including-dead
enemy attack settings
* Fixed a bug that could occasionally cause attacks targeting heros to
fail randomly under certain circumstances
* Fixed a bug that prevented Rare Items from showing up after battle
* In CUSTOM.EXE you can now browse your Tag names by typing in their
number instead of scrolling through them all. (People with tag names
in existing games will need to scroll through them once before it will
work)
* When GAME.EXE is run, it checks its own filename. If it has been
renamed to anything other than GAME.EXE then it will automatically try
to load an RPG file of the same name from the same directory. This
means if your game's name is QUEST.RPG then you can distribute a copy
of GAME.EXE renamed to QUEST.EXE together with it and make it nice and
easy for users to run your game
* GAME.EXE no longer requires OHRRPGCE.MAS (but CUSTOM.EXE still needs it)
* Supressed the warning if OHRRPGCE.FNT is missing when you start a
specific RPG file from the command-line or from a renamed GAME.EXE
(although without OHRRPGCE.FNT, the "Loading..." wont appear)
* Fixed a bug in the "check tag" plotscripting command so that it returns
1 when the tag is true instead of -1
* Fixed a bug in damage calculation that caused defence to used
incorrectly in "Sharp", "Blunt", and "Pure" attacks
* Added a bitset to simulate the old Level-up bug found in very old
versions of GAME.EXE and a debugging key (F7) to turn it off and on.
This helps for playing old obsolete games like FUABMX that depended on
the bug for proper difficulty... or you can also enable it if you
happen to be making a game that would benefit from heros equipment
bonuses getting merged into their stats whenever you get a levelup.
Are you happy, Rya? :)
* Added new debugging keys F8 and F9 to raw-edit the gen() and gmap()
data. This isnt likely to mean anything to anybody but me, but it can
be fun to mess with it and try to crash your game :)
Sept 15 2000
* Added plotscripting commands unequip,forceequip,equipwhere,
checkequipment,getdefaultweapon, setdefaultweapon, and rankincaterpillar
* Fixed an embarassingly stupid error in the "NPC direction" command
* Joystick buttons now behave more like keyboard keys.
* Tag-debug mode now lets you turn tags OFF with CTRL- and ON with CTRL+
* Changing maps while a background is displaying no longer displays the
tileset
* Riding a vehicle that has door use disabled does not disable the
"use door" plotscripting command, or doors that are forced by
text boxes
* Debugging keys can be disabled by a bitset in the General game Data
menu.
* Added two debugging keys to battle mode CTRL+F4 instantly runs from any
battle, and CTRL+F5 gives you a million experience points
* Fixed a longstanding bug that affected both the usedoor and the
teleporttomap plotscripting commands, that caused "noop" errors in
certain circumstances-- Woo! I have been hunting for that one for
SOOOO long! It feels great to fix it! ... Hope I didnt create any
new bugs in the process :)
* the teleporttomap plotscripting command takes its coordinates
in maptiles now, not pixels (adjust your scripts accordingly, sorry
for the inconvenience)
* GAME.EXE no longer leaves behind STACK.TMP in your TEMP directory
* If you try to import a .HS file that is not really a compiled
plotscript, CUSTOM.EXE now displays a helpful and slightly sarcastic
error message instead of crashing
* Added a pretty ready-meter and a health-meter to battle mode
* Names and menus dissapear after you win a battle, while it shows
you your winnings and levelups
* Displays the correct name for "MP" on the spell select screen
* Enemy's "harmed by cure" bitset no longer applies to absorbing
elemental damage
* Fixed lockup when trying to trigger a random battle from a completely
empty formation set
* Attacks can now have any stat as a "Base Stat" or "Target Stat"
The "Damage MP" bitset is now obsolete, but still works for backwards
compatability
* New Attack Bitsets; "Absorb Damage", "Do not Randomize"
"Damage can be Zero", "Reset target stat to max before hit",
"Allow cure to exceed maximum", "Do not display damage",
"Show attack name", "Fail vs Elemental Resistance", and
"Fail vs Enemy Type"
* New attack types that set the target stat to a percentage (intended for
near-kill spells, cure-all spells, spells that modify stats, etc.)
* Fixed a bug that could cause file bloat when pressing PGUP and PGDN
under certain curcumstances in the sprite editor
* Correctly checks for OHRRPGCE.MAS and OHRRPGCE.FNT and exits gracefully
if they are missing
May 28 2000
* Added "After battle" plotscript, which can take a single argument
which is true if you won and false if you ran from the battle
* Screen shots taken with F12 are now stored in the same directory
as the RPG file
* Added a progress meter for loading especially large directories
* Now correctly cleans up temporary files when you quit a game and load
another
* Fixed a bug that sometimes caused scripts to interfere with each other
(the intro in Wandering Hamster works again)
* Fixed the bug that caused vehicles of speed 10 to freeze
* When activating an NPC that changes tags, the tag changes no longer
take effect instantly, they wait for the text box.
* Added plotscripting functions herodirection and NPCdirection
May 8 2000
* Vehicle support! Mark your map with A and B tiles in wallmapping mode,
then set any NPC to one of the predefined vehicle types, or create
your own vehicle types.
* Converted HOWTO from text to html (with pictures!). There is still
a text version, based on the html version
* Added plotscript commands; dismountvehicle,iskeypressed,readmapblock
readpassblock,writemapblock,writepassblock
* waitforkeypress(anykey) plotscripting command now returns the value
of the pressed key
* Added an "After-Battle" plotscript in the "general map data" menu
that automatically sends true/false for its first argument based
on if you ran from battle. Also made the fightformation plotscripting
command return true if you ran from battle, false if you won
* Fixed a bug that caused the game timer stop if you where playing
at midnight.
* Maximum tag number is now 999 instead of 500
* Fixed a bug that prevented one-time usable NPCs from dissapearing
if they did not trigger a text box
* Added an "EXIT" button to the "Load Game" screen in GAME.EXE for the
benefit of people who dont instinctively know to press ESC to get out
of DOS games
* Screen-shots taken by GAME.EXE with F12 are now patched for
MS-paint compatability (grumble)
* Sprite editor now lets you go up to 99 palettes instead of 90
* Adjusted levelup calculation, and fixed starting-experience bug
for heros added at levels higher than 1
* Fixed a bug in the "resume hero walls" plotscripting command
* Fixed a big bug in the "while" looping command for plotscripting
now it is possible to use a while loop that iterates more than once
without crashing and burning :)
* You can give your game a long title and "about" information that will
be displayed instead of the filename when browsing for RPG files
January 31 2000
* GAME.EXE now keeps track of how long you have played a game.
This is displayed on the save/load screens instead of HP
* Days, hours, and minutes of gameplay are available to plotscripts
via the plotscripting functions: days of play, hours of play,
minutes of play
* Heros and NPCs are no longer drawn 5 pixels up from the maptiles.
You can now set a custom "Foot Offset" for each map
* File browser now alphabetizes file listings
(only by the first letter, for speed)
* BMP files of the wrong size and bit depth now show up greyed-out
in the import browser
* The PlotScript interpreter is now more resistant to being crashed
by bad scripts
* Fixed cursor glytch while picking tiles in tilemap mode
* Fixed the swapped menu items in the graphics menu
January 25 2000
* Reorganised the main menu, and put al graphics-related stuff in an
"Edit Graphics" submenu
* You can now make tiles on a map damage your hero when you step on them.
Press H in wallmap mode to place Harm-Tiles. (default damage is zero)
* The If-tag-set-tag conditional for text boxes can now set two tags
instead of just one. In making this change, I removed the
"If tag then stop" conditional, as it was pretty much completely
useless, and as far as I know nobody ever used it. If anyone out
there did actually use it, I appologise for the inconvenience.
* The airbrush tool in the MapTile editor can no longer wrap over the
edge of the screen and mess up other tiles.
* Yay! The mapeditor in wallmapping mode no longer flickers in a
seisure-inducing way. Yay!
* Eliminated OHRRPGCE.ALL and OHRRPGCE.PAL. These files are no longer
needed to run custom.exe.
* Fixed the bug that resulted in corrupt map data after deleting a map,
and repaired Map 0 in the default new-game.
* Fixed a bug that would cause CUSTOM.EXE to lock while exporting an HSI
file if you gave something a name that ended with a very long number.
* Fixed some crashes in the Shop Stuff editor
December 21 1999
* Re-fixed the running-scripts-from-text-boxes bug.
Deja-vu! I couldve sworn I fixed that already :P
December 19 1999
* The HamsterSpeak syntax for math and comparison has changed.
If you have a script that uses the old style of commands
it will not compile correctly. See hamsterspeak.html and
plotdictionary.html for details
* Added the following plotscripting commands:
getherostat, setherostat, setNPCspeed, suspendboxadvance,
resumeboxadvance, advancebox, setheroframe, setNPCframe
* Fixed bugs in the following plotscripting commands:
addhero, swapouthero, swapinhero, lockhero, unlockhero
* Global script variables are now stored in savegames
* Autodetection and repair of corrupted maps
* When you create a new text box, it takes its default appearance
from text box 0
* You can now set a hero's default level to "Party Average"
* TAB characters are now allowed in plotscripts
* HSPEAK.EXE now runs in DOS (for real this time :)
November 17 1999
* Fixed the bug that stripped scripts from the text boxes that where
supposed to trigger them
* Fixed the bug in the "wait for hero" plotscripting command
* I had to restore from a backup copy of my code, and a few commands
present in the buggy November 12 update have not been reimplemented,
namely, findhero, swapspecifichero, setherostat, and getherostat
November 11 1999
* Reduced the conventional memory requirements of GAME.EXE and CUSTOM.EXE
Im not happy about the way I had to do this, but too many people where
getting DOS memory errors.
November 10 1999
* Fixed the bug in CUSTOM.EXE that sometimes caused animating maptiles to
crash the program
* Fixed the bug that prevented one-time-usable NPCs from disappearing
after you use them
November 9 1999
* Plotscripting!
For more information, view plotscripttutor.html, plotdictionary.html
and hamsterspeak.html. I have also included the source for the
plotscripts in Wandering Hamster so you can look at them for examples
* fixed the nasty, but simple bug that used to cause GAME.EXE to crash
on maps numbered above 39
* CUSTOM.EXE now runs some checks on an RPG file before it will save it
to help prevent corruption
* Joystick support that actually works! Press J to calibrate at any time.
* You can now link together Text boxes without going into the conditionals
screen
* The conditionals screen for text boxes is now much easyer to look at.
Disabled conditions are greyed out
"Always" conditionals appear in blue
normal conditionals appear in brown
* Quiting, or dying in battle now takes you back to the title screen,
not all the way to the game select screen.
* You can make your map display a default tile beyond its borders
instead of usinging the camera to crop the edges. This way you can have
a map where your hero is always in the center of the screen, no matter
how close you come to the edges.
* You can make your map wrap at the edges, so if you walk off one side,
you automatically go to the other side. Great for overworld maps!
(NPCs no not wrap)
* GAME.EXE now prints an error message instead of locking if it cant find
OHRRPGCE.MAS or OHRRPGCE.FNT
* Consumable items that trigger text boxes are actually consumed now
* You can give names to your Maps.
these names can optionally be displayed when you enter a map,
and the name of the map that you saved on will be displayed
on the save/load screens
(your existing maps may start with gibberish names that you will
have to replace. this does not affect new maps)
* If you use hero swapping to remove all of the living heros from a
party, leaving an active party of all-dead heros, one of them will
automatically pop back to life with 1 HP
* When CUSTOM.EXE finds and attempts to recover unlumped data, it will
save it with a .BAK extention instead of overwriting the existing
.RPG file
* assorted minor/frivolous/gratuitous bugfixes that you wont notice
Aug 26 1999
* Repaired a bug in RPG file unlumping
* Eliminated the delay after text boxes (actually just vastly reduced it)
* Improved built-in Sprite editor and built-in Maptile editor.
Added circle tool and airbrush. thanks to IronHoof for both
* Assorted Small bugfixes
July 8 1999
* Fixes the bug in the July 5 version that causes GAME.EXE to crash when
you try to save. I cant believe I let that one slip past me! Argh!
* Fixes a problem some people had with the "Do I have this item?" tags
* A new feature has been added to several parts of CUSTOM.EXE that lets
you delete all records after the current record. For example, RPG files
created with older versions of custom.exe have 999 text boxes, even if
you have not put any text in any of them. By erasing extra data you can
fix the problem that some people experience with undefined heros, enemies
or items getting filled with copies of the last hero/enemy/item you made.
It can also slightly reduce the size of your RPG file.
To use this feature, find the last record (last hero, last text box,
last whatever) and press CTRL+BACKSPACE. this feature works for:
-text boxes
-hero data
-item data
-enemy data
-attack data
-enemy formations
-map tile sets
-imported backgrounds
-all sprite graphics
-shops
* Maximum enemy definitions increased from 500 to 32767
Maximum attack definitions increased from 200 to 32767
Maximum enemy formations increased from 1000 to 32767
Maximum map tile sets increased from 15 to 32767
Maximum shops sets increased from 255 to 32767
Maximum of all types of sprites increased to 32767
(note that making 32767 hero sprites would be silly, because the limit
for heros is still 40, and will remain 40 in the forseeable future)
July 5 1999
* If you buy/hire everything in a shop and there is nothing left,
you get knocked out of the shop (instead of giving you an unlimited
free supply of the first item)
* You can make a item call a text box when used. A positive "when used
outside of battle" is still an attack, but a negative value now
represents a text box.
* Browsing for files in CUSTOM.EXE no longer crashes under real DOS
* GAME.EXE does not keep all of its .SAV files in its own directory
anymore. .SAV file now belong in the same directory as the .RPG files
that they go with
* Snapshot (F12) works again
June 21 1999
* Fixed the bug that deleted the mouse cursor for some people.
people who already have this problem in their RPG files need
to go into the font editor and press CTRL+ALT+F to reload the
default font
June 18 1999
* Fixed the _other_ bug in levelup calculation.
You will now have the correct stats at level 99
* Tag Naming-- You can give descriptions to your tags to help you
remember what each tag means
* Second "Check" and Second "Set" tags in the item data now apply to
selling items instead of buying items
* Save Changes/Discard Changes choice has been replaced with
Continue Editing/Save Changes/Discard Changes for the benefit of
people who get trigger-happy with the ESC key.
* GAME.EXE no longer crashes if you highlight "CANCEL" while picking
a spell to cast and press left or right
* The map editor no longer crashes when placing doors on a map numbered
20 or higher
* New animating maptiles! The last two tile in a set do NOT automatically
animate. Instead, you need to create animation-patterns. See HOWTO.TXT
for details
* GAME.EXE can now browse for RPG files in any directory
(browsing other drives is not yet supported)
* Windows users can now associate .RPG files with GAME.EXE and run any
game just by double clicking it
* CUSTOM.EXE can browse for BAM files and BMP files from any directory.
You no longer have to keep it all in the IMPORT subdirectory
(browsing other drives is not yet supported)
* The lockup bug in the shop editor has been fixed
* You can give descriptive names to BAM files after you import them
* A built-in font editor!
* NPCs set to "Chase" or "Avoid" no longer flicker
* Passwords are stored in a more secure way
* You can now add up to 32767 text boxes instead of just 999
* The dialogue editor allows you to jump to any text box by typing its
number
* Tag-debug mode in GAME.EXE. Press F4 to enable it, and + and -
to scroll through the tags
* You can assign tags to be automatically set when a hero is in your
party, is the leader, is alive, or is in your currently active
party
* You can assign tags to be automatically set when you own at least one
of a particular item, have that item in your inventory, have that
item equiped, or have that item equiped on a hero you are currently
using